The Phenomenology of Shepard
by Elana.S
Summary: Shepard has lost more than she let on after her reconstruction by Cerberus. A consuming attraction for the drell assassin promises a passionate recovery of her senses. Cover image courtesy of Marianne-Khalil (dot deviantart)
1. Chapter 1

**PROLOGUE 1: A self-diagnosis**

No one is going to fault Shepard for bending the truth with Cerberus people.

Miranda's "field test" in the shuttle from the Lazarus station had been easy, leading questions. Did she feel shitty about leaving Ashley Williams to die on Virmire? Yeah, she did. Thinking about it gave her a familiar knot in her unfamiliar new cyborg gut. Truly, there was no way Miranda could have guessed what kinds of questions would have been real tests.

"What colour was the sky on Virmire?"

"What is your ideal shower water temperature?"

"Describe the sound of your mother's voice."

Shepard would have been forced to stall, to clear her throat, because the answer to those questions would have been: "I have no fucking idea."

Her mind was equipped with a lot of facts about herself. Some memories — like Virmire — even had feelings associated with them. But there was something deeply wrong with the thought contents of her reconstructed brain, rattling like burnt chestnuts in a charred tin can. The quality was missing. The qualia. She knew who she was, but she didn't know how it felt to be her. Which means she wasn't totally confident about _what_ she was.

Her mind wrestled with the name 'Wrex' and couldn't put a face to it.

Cerberus had realized a miracle of life, but like so many of their projects, there was something hollow about it.

Luckily Commander Shepard had enough spark to spare. And the good sense not to tell Miranda, who might have taken it as her own failure and tried to retroactively terminate the project.

Shepard's last moments, during the destruction of the Normandy — moments that were already two years old — were her only vivid memories of how it felt to be the natural-born Shepard: what her body felt like, the athleticism of her gait, what the inside of her helmet smelled like, the sensation of locking eyes with Liara to communicate reassurance as the _Normandy_ went up in flames around them. Her adrenaline-laced terror never had the chance to be shunted into long-term memory before she got fried in atmosphere, and so those moments never underwent the same sterile reconstruction by Cerberus tech as the rest of her lifetime did.

Her only real memory was of dying, and that made her one fearless motherfucker.

**PROLOGUE 2: A lover's observations**

_This is not to say that Shepard was not Shepard. The _je ne sais quoi_ components of life experience are, as it turns out, not necessary to maintain the essential qualities of personality and behaviour. Shepard was still Shepard, just as the Illusive Man had desired. And it was the very Shepard-like qualities that she still possessed which enabled her to carry on with business, despite silently realizing the emptiness of the memories rattling in her brain. Shepard had never been particularly sentimental. On the contrary, she was harsh with herself and dismissive of emotions beyond 'righteous rage' and 'spontaneous delight'. All else was simply not utilitarian. She was fiercely intellectual, solutions-oriented, and private with her weakness._

_This description makes her sound like a terrifying warrior — but it fails to capture the _je ne sais quois _of her comportment. Part of the reason why she was almost never recognized during her comings and goings despite being a legendary war hero several times over is that she was generally bereft of any type of heroic presence. Her charisma was of a disarming sort, so long as she had no particular intentions with you. She was unapologetically feminine, entirely unsoldier-like — until it was too late for her opponent. This, too, had served her well._

_All of these discussions somehow illustrate that the sensual qualities of life — the things that are difficult to describe, the things that make life something that we inhabit rather than simply observe — are simultaneously elusive and irrelevant, and also deeply, fundamentally important._

_Shepard mused on these themes a great deal._

_I loved her for it._

* * *

Thane sensed his pursuers like a pressure wave that moved at the speed of sand. Their advance was as slow and relentless as the dunes of Rakhana. Any sprint race to the top of Dantius Towers, he would win: his silent, solitary fang-strikes allowed him to needle his way through the opposition, bypassing any confrontations too large to be worth the time. His pursuers, however, engulfed everything in their wake — even systematically freeing the pockets of salarians he'd locked in safety, now free to wander off through the recently sanitized lower levels.

Unable to resist his curiosity, he paused in an air vent and allowed the trio of human soldiers to catch up to him. Reconnaissance, he justified to himself. But to his surprise, only one of them really resembled the term 'soldier': a gray-haired, gray-faced man whose slightly obsolete assault rifle punched through enemies with a shameless _brat-tat-tat_. Zaeed Massani: the name came to him with the image of an old mark briefly advertised in the right wrong places. Thane was rarely wrong about that sort of thing. The man's identity explained the fierceness with which he took down the mercs in his path.

The nearly inaudible whine of a cloak discharging drew his attention to the second figure. A woman, petite and hooded, laughed easily to herself, having returned to squad lines before her victim had time to collapse. No name came readily for her as it did for the large older man, but there was something familiar in the ways the bodies fell. Also, few indeed had such a high-end cloak, and as finely tuned. It was beyond military grade, to the very top of the black markets. Custom, if his ears did not betray him. They rarely did.

Strategically, the two couldn't be further apart. Stealth and brawn in forms that were discordant rather than complementary. Yet they were both taking cues from one source: the third figure, hanging back, the weft that held together their tenuous weave.

The field was splayed with the blazing trails of fireballs, punctuated by combat drones darting to and fro, criss-crossed by precision pistol shots in a manner that made the chaos coherent. This third soldier, positioned well in the rear, did not need to navigate the battlefield: she managed it. Her tactics transformed the frantic movements of enemy mercs into a text unfolding before his eyes, which she could read as fluently as she could execute the people within it. From his overhead vantage point, so could he. It was beautiful.

The part of Thane's mind which habitually counted bodies as they fell, made a note that it was this figure responsible for most of the body count, with the other two serving as distraction and cleanup duty respectively.

She, he thought. This warrior is a she.

It should not have surprised him. The drell are accustomed to strong female figures. Their pantheon of gods was skewed towards feminine avatars. Why did his thoughts wander to his deities? _Arashu,_ his mind whispered to him, all tangled up in memories. But the woman firing death from her omni-tool was small, with a tightly coiled presence. Mortal, fragile. Her armour was a jewel-toned blue. She huddled behind the cover of a bulkhead. It was a strategically sound position — optimal, in fact, given the layout of the room — but it still made her look so small, so vulnerable.

This dichotomy with her combat deadliness fascinated him.

Suddenly he was spurred to action, a fire lit within him from embers he long thought dead. He took off through the darkness. He spiralled higher and higher, daring to confront Arashu herself in the Illium skies.

* * *

The sound of her voice nearly threw him off. It had a certain richness that wasn't often expressed in the voices of humans, a people often mocked for their stridency by other species. Her tone was also straightforward; she didn't play games. "I'm not an assassin, Nassana, though I am looking for one." Thane permitted himself a private smile, listening from a maintenance shaft in the ceiling.

Do you know I am here, warrior? Do you know I am right above you? Are your words now for her, or for me?

He took a moment to pray, then moved into swift action. He sent off two guards to investigate the sound of not-Thane. He decided to slip down into the room to take out the remaining three. He killed them each consecutively, from noiseless neck-twist to throat-punch to pistol shot. He spun Nassana and placed the gun elegantly at her waist. The bullet pierced organs consecutively, one to the next until death.

As he laid her down, he felt three sets of eyes on him, appraising him. The fluidity of his executions had been so precise, seemingly perfect: but he knew all of the other ways he could have done it. He had chosen one that he thought she would appreciate.

Something that would please her eyes.

He bent his head, praying forgiveness of Amonkira for his vanity.

* * *

At first, Shepard had no idea what use an assassin would be when the mission was a strike against the Collectors. Everyone else had more or less made sense: a scientist, to create countermeasures against the advanced technology they'd be facing; various beefy murderous gun-toting types; requisite Cerberus watchdogs. She went along with the arguments for Kasumi's talents for stealth, since she was generally in favour of diversity in skillsets, and she was delighted she had done so. The thief turned out to be one of the Commander's closest friends and allies, as good for a laugh on the ship as for reliable support in the field. It was partly Kasumi's persuasive daily demonstration of the usefulness of invisible recon that made Shepard decide to pick up the assassin on her way to finding the asari super-biotic.

Shepard generally preferred to kill people before they knew she was there, when she had the option. This style was demonstrated in her favourite manoeuvre of dropping a combat drone behind an unwitting enemy and then sniping them in the back of the head when they turn to face it. It was efficient, and more importantly, it was safe. You don't save the galaxy and live to fight another day by charging into the middle of every situation. It might work for some of the crazy biotic-types, but not for this N7. She never had anything but her wits to keep her alive. Luckily she had a damn talented mind.

Thane Krios was arguably the best in the galaxy at murdering people before they realize that he is there. So in the end, it was an easy decision.

Interrupting one of his jobs was the only obvious way to locate him, since he would no doubt go to ground as soon as the job was done, and be off-grid and unfindable for far longer than Shepard was willing to wait. It would also be an interesting way to see how he reacts to their surprise intervention. A character test.

His response to their presence intrigued her.

Shepard had recognized the dialogue way back in the first tower, when a freshly-killed body had fallen through an air shaft to land with a gruesome bounce at their feet — like a cat dropping a bird on your doorstep. She smiled to herself. For me? You shouldn't have.

This assassin was leaving such tantalizing traces of himself for her to find. Each pocket of salarians with their own stories of being safely squirreled away made her anticipate their meeting more and more. The take-no-prisoners attitude of most of the people she'd encountered in the Terminus Systems was certainly effective in its brutality, but it was a breath of fresh air to find signs of someone who genuinely cared about innocent bystanders.

But finally, here she was at the top of Dantius Towers, facing an asari who was anything but innocent. She was almost too impatient to talk to her.

Shepard heard the sound that drew off two of Nassana's guards. The crease in her brow, though, was not of concern for what they might find; it was knowing that they were almost certainly not hearing the assassin. No way. She could already tell he was way too good for that.

And then he dropped from above and slaughtered four people with a dancer's grace.

He was a drell, with enormous dark eyes and Classical proportions to his reptilian face. His head was textured with ridges, and a scaly plate shaped like a flat-edged diamond darkened his forehead like a third eye chakra. A long, inky black jacket with stylish points at the shoulders obscured much of his body in shadow. Apart from his bare upper chest, his sinewy strength was only implied by the raw physicality of his confidence: an understated, powerful presence.

As Nassana's body was falling, Shepard, too, was slain.

Kasumi looked at her with a sly sideways glance.

"Thane Krios?" Shepard asked in the suddenly still air.

"You have found me," he said. His voice had a rich thrum of subharmonics like smooth stones at the bottom of a pool. His diction was as elegant as the deliberate motions of his body.

"I need you for a mission," Shepard said.

"…in my pants," Kasumi muttered under her breath.

Zaeed's inadvertent 'ha!' was quickly strangled in his throat.

Shooting a glance at Kasumi, Shepard's eyes said, "shut it!" while the twist of her lips admitted that it was pretty funny. One of Kasumi's cybernetic eye-lights blinked off briefly in a shadowy wink.

Smoothly turning back to Thane, Shepard continued: "You're familiar with the Collectors?"

"By reputation," Thane replied, thoughtful.

"They're abducting entire human colonies. Freedom's Progress was their handiwork."

"I see."

"We're going after them."

"Attacking the Collectors would require passing through the Omega-4 relay. No ship has ever returned from doing so."

"I have a good one. It's called the _Normandy_."

It was hard to tell, with those large black-on-black eyes, what the drell was looking at, but he seemed to glance at the N7 emblem on her armour before saying, "I see. Commander Shepard. You are known to me by reputation as well."

Shepard glossed over her notoriety. That was as far as she liked to go with introductions. "I'm assembling a good team, and we have a lot of resources. We'll find a way through the Omega-4 relay."

Thane looked at her for a long moment, then turned away to face the window. Tasale was rising; he was backlit by the dawning light shining weakly into what used to be Nassana Dantius' office.

"This was to be my last job. I'm dying."

Shepard heard the rustle of Kasumi and Zaeed exchanging glances behind her. But the drell continued.

"Low survival odds don't concern me. The abduction of your colonists does."

Shepard felt a tingle go up her spine when the drell said, "I will work for you, Shepard. No charge."

His was the first and only unconditional offer of support she had encountered since her… revival. There was no, 'one thing you must do for me', no need for a daring rescue that would put him in her debt. Not even a fee.

It might have been unsettlingly opaque — or perhaps morbid, given the way he casually mentioned that he was dying — if she didn't have the sense that they had already reached an intimate mutual understanding before ever exchanging words.

It also helped that his voice made warm vibrations in her chest.

And that he looked bad ass in black.

* * *

The legendary Commander Shepard removed her helmet once inside the skycar they liberated from the rooftop landing pad. Thane's breath caught in his throat at the sight of her slim jawline, high cheekbones, and the hypnotic flutter of those tiny hairs humans have edging their eyelids. The hair atop her head was a crimson shade he had never seen on a human before. It was tied into a once-artful chignon that had been crushed under the weight of her helmet. His eyes drank in the colour, the soft, exotic texture, and he realized he was staring.

Even an adolescent drell knows to just shoot a glance and savour the eidetic memory. He granted himself forgiveness. This was Commander Shepard. Anyone would be off-kilter upon meeting her.

Her reputation was one thing. Council Spectre, saviour of the galaxy with numerous dalliances with saving this or that colony or population, back from the dead. But her comportment belied all of that. The woman relaxed into her seat in an easy slouch. She propped an elbow on the edge of the window and gazed out at the tall buildings flying by. She sighed almost rapturously: "Illium is fucking gorgeous, isn't it?" she said, and Thane began to see why the Alliance had quickly dropped her from their recruitment ads.

It was the same dichotomy of the vulnerable young woman, huddled in cover, while murdering all her opponents with blinding efficiency. A warrior's soul blazed behind feminine features and soft crimson hair. It was a confusing, mixed message for military advertisements. She was a fierce, unstoppable war hero who made you want to hold her in your arms protectively.

Or maybe that was just him.

Certainly it would be dangerous to underestimate her. Perhaps that was another tool she used to make her more deadly. It was an advantage he had exploited a great deal early in his career, in a line of work where targets are more likely to fixate on krogan- or turian-shaped threats.

"Is there anything you need to pick up before we get you settled on the _Normandy_?" she asked. She was facing him now, twisted around in the front seat to look at him. Goddess of Oceans, she was actually beautiful, in a way he had never imagined another species could be. Her features in delicate proportions, with dark and expressive eyes wide-set and feline, her full lips red like a desert bloom against the pale sand of her skin.

The moment had stretched too long, and Shepard said, "I mean, we can provide you with most of the basic necessities on the ship."

Returning to himself, Thane replied, "I can pick up my kit near the Nos Astra spaceport."

He thought he saw her smile to herself as she turned back to face the window again.

* * *

Dry air vented from the pumps of the ship's life support system. A window into the engine core flickered with light that seemed almost aquatic, but the arid atmosphere was kind to his lungs. It was ideally comfortable for the drell.

He set down his two bags: one small rucksack with the tools of his daily ablutions, and a much larger hardcase which he laid on the table and flipped open. Sniper rifles, telescoped and compact, lay in neat rows alongside immaculate SMGs.

His body required only the dimensions of his cot, but the tools of his trade would always be privileged with sufficient and orderly space. Spying a switch by the windowsill, Thane flipped it to trigger the wall-panels to recede into angled racks illuminated by bright, cool-toned white light.

How apropos, that Cerberus would install hidden gun racks in their ships' Life Support rooms.

He laid the rifles on the racks in a symmetry that would rest easily in his vision. This room was to serve as his sleeping quarters, battle tent, and meditation chamber, after all.

She came to visit him just as he had finished unpacking his things. She was in her ship's clothes: a slim-fitting black dress with a diamond-shaped neckline. An elegant colonial style of the Serpent Nebula, sleek and decadent: it suited her, with her aristocratic cheekbones, slender, shapely calves, and her white shoulders round-muscled as a seabird's breast. The fiery red of her hair, controlled and twisted atop her head in artful swirls, asserted _civilization_, no matter where they might be in the Terminus Systems. Of course; Shepard was from the human colonies, as Thane recalled. She exuded the determination of those who set out to conquer the wilds of space: that entitlement to enforcing order even when nature herself strove against you. Despite this, her presence crackled with physicality, an unpredictable feral energy. Like the obsidian figurines of Arashu from Rakhana, no amount of lovely drapery can tame the image of a warrior-goddess.

"How do you like it?" she asked, vaguely.

It took an instant for him to realize she was referring to the room. "This is more than sufficient," he replied, watching her take a seat at the table across from him as though she owned it. _Effectively, I suppose she does,_ Thane thought. This was her ship.

"I wanted to ask about your disease," she said without hesitation or discomfort, and then regarded him silently. Apparently no actual question was forthcoming.

"Yes," he said. This explanation ought to have been well practiced, but in truth he had rarely discussed his health with others. "You needn't worry. Kepral's Syndrome is not communicable, even to other drell. It is a consequence of my species' relocation to the hanar homeworld. We are native to an arid planet, but Kahje is humid, and it rains every day. Over time, our lung tissue loses the ability to absorb oxygen. It becomes harder to breathe. Eventually, we suffocate."

Shepard sat quietly and listened. Her dark, almond eyes were soft and sympathetic. She blinked, slowly, with those hypnotic feathery eyelashes. Humans have only one set of eyelids; it was so mammalian, so vulnerably sylvan.

"And a dry environment will slow its progress," she asked, but it was pitched like a statement.

"Yes, although the disease is cumulative and the damage is impossible to heal." His voice was even, emotionally unswayed by facts that might have been callous for some, bitterly melancholy for most. He, however, had long been resigned to his fate.

She rested her elbows on the table, her fingers interlocked, pressing her lips to her thumbs as she thought. She had a surprisingly contemplative manner, for a soldier.

"I'm sorry I have to ask, but: are you going to be alright until the end of the mission?"

The question was necessary; that she should apologize for asking it, quirked pleasantly at Thane's honour-driven sensibilities. That she should ask only after already accommodating him on her ship, he found intriguingly noble.

"I should be fine for another eight to twelve months. I think it's safe to say that by the time my body is incapacitated, we will be victorious. …Or dead. Either way," he said, not fully able to strip the bitterness from creeping into his voice, "I won't be a burden to you."

She was looking at him, her eyes moving across his face, studying him. She seemed to come to a conclusion, and a glimmer in her dark eyes was like sunlight on river stones. "Funny thing about irreversible medical conditions. They usually say death by atmospheric re-entry is irreversible, too. The world is full of surprises."

She stood from the table, started for the door. Thane's eyes tracked her with the intensity of a sighted target — but who was the contractor, if not himself?

She paused by the door. "Please, let me know if there's anything I can do to help," she said, her voice low, earnest, musical.

And he saw he was fixed in the perfect laser target of Shepard's legendary charisma. The woman who could talk down raging krogan was gazing at him like he was the only thing in the world that mattered. He was frozen prey, caught in her sights. He felt time stop, as though he were falling into a memory.

A breath, and he realized nothing could ever be the same. He could suddenly distinguish new dreams, because he had been snapped from a battle-sleep he had not even recognized.

* * *

Their business on Illium was not concluded. There was another person, another cultural outsider Shepard had decided to recruit. An asari justicar.

In the conference room, Shepard selected her squad. "Garrus, I want you on this with me, because we're going to be interfacing with local law enforcement. You're best at chatting them up. Thane, you know Nos Astra better than any of us, so you're up too."

Shepard liked to take out new recruits right away. It accelerated everything about getting to know each other. Thane, though, didn't feel much like a recruit. The notable absence of any type of transactional quality to his joining the _Normandy_ crew made him feel like a collaborator rather than a subordinate — some sort of third party contractor without a contract.

But she had established the habit, and saw no reason to break it. It would still be useful to see him in action as part of a squad rather than a solitary agent.

Privately, Shepard also wanted Garrus to size him up. She trusted his opinion.

There was also an outside chance of the sniper's equivalent of a pissing contest, and she was dying to see that.


	2. Chapter 2

Illium pulsed with the cosmopolitan hubbub of the Citadel, but it was still a planetary colony, with proper air and a proper up-versus-down. That and its undercurrent of frontier lawlessness made Shepard feel oddly at home in the place. It was a world which seemed to contain within it all of the strange convolutions of her life: from peripheral colony kid to urban Spectre legend, and now to paramilitary shadow puppet. She adored the magnificent arcology of Nos Astra, towers stretching down to a ground level lost through criss-crossing skycar traffic and mist. It was a city where one could be suitably anonymous. Plus, her favourite colour — these days, at least — was blue, and the atmosphere here seemed tinted with it, endowing everything with a pleasantly filtered glow.

She had let Garrus take point on consulting with the tracking officer and the local police. She didn't want to force him to translate cop-speak for her benefit, and anyway cops behaved differently with outsider eyes in the room. This left her and Thane in the small plaza of the commercial spaceport, loitering amidst various shady personages. They drew some glances, but not many; neither were they a particularly unusual pair in this metropolis, nor were the people of Nos Astra inclined to start trouble.

She was turning to Thane, about to explain her reasoning for standing there while Garrus did the legwork, when he murmured, "Ex-cop?"

She got the sense that his upward inflection was only him being modest. "Yes, he used to work with–"

"C-Sec, yes. Garrus Vakarian. Investigation Division. He was one of the good ones."

She raised her brows at him. He was looking into the middle distance of Nos Astra's shimmering twilight, hands clasped behind his back, polite as a sheathed dagger. She enjoyed puzzles more than she disliked being interrupted, and she was very curious what led Thane to this knowledge — and opinion.

"I've done some wetwork on the Citadel," he said unsolicited, by way of explanation. "Agent Vakarian came closer than most to discovering my identity."

Shepard choked back a surprised laugh. "Don't ever tell him how many of his cold cases you can solve for him, okay?"

The blue-toned Illium light danced across the drell's dark corneas, his lips turning upwards in amusement. "Alright."

_Mm, so he has a sense of humour. Now how do I get him to say 'wetwork' again?_

"I imagine he quit the force because he was frustrated with cumbersome protocol," Thane said.

Shepard looked at him with some wonder. "Damn, you really do always hit your mark."

"I overheard some conversation while I was there, and I don't easily forget."

"I believe that. Is that all you overheard about him?" She leaned forward on her toes, enticed by the prospect of gaining some real ammunition on Garrus for their next round of playfully smug banter —

— but Garrus was emerging from the police station. He stalked over to them with that high-waisted turian swagger. "The justicar is in the middle of a crime scene, go figure," he said. "Deep in Eclipse territory. We have permission to enter the scene and investigate." He looked from Shepard to the drell and back again. She had wheeled around when Garrus arrived, one step short of emphatically casual whistling. Thane's posture, erect and level-shouldered, was credibly impassive. So Garrus turned his narrowed gaze on Shepard's affectation of innocence.

"…What?" grumbled Garrus, clearly watching himself take the bait.

* * *

In their first skirmish against Eclipse mercs, Shepard could see the problem. Enemies — usually the ones closest to her — would find themselves double-dead, two simultaneous headshots airing out the interiors of their skulls. This was hardly efficient. Once the alleyway was cleared, her two squadmates moved together to consult behind her.

"Listen–" Garrus said, just as Thane said, "I beg your–" The mixed rumblings of turian and drell voices made Shepard bite back her grin.

"Listen," Garrus resumed, his mandibles flicking in exasperation. "Just take a position and work that half of the field. I can take care of the rest. Trust me." Oh, so he had gotten defensive. Maybe too many of Thane's shots had landed first.

The drell agreed without argument. The flip side of not generally being a team player is that he had no use for posturing. Shepard approved.

The trio moved to turn a corner in the alley. "Enemy signals," Garrus' voice warned.

"I see them," she replied. She rarely missed anything on her radar, but Garrus liked to verbalize a lot, and it suited her to know what he knew. There was an easy familiarity to their rapport.

Her combat drone went out ahead, as usual. It drew surprised fire from the mercs lying in wait. She pursed her lips and identified the multitude of weapon types from the sounds of their various impacts. "Rockets," she said to Garrus with a quick two-fingered gesture, the only command necessary as they rounded the corner as one. The turian put a hole in the brains of each merc wielding rocket launchers on the far side of the room.

"Ha ha! Scoped and dropped," he declared, backing off to reload for his next deadly salvo. Shepard grinned as she fried the guns of the grunts standing closest to them, leaving them stunned and defenceless to the spray of her SMG. She appreciated Garrus' dark sense of fun, even if Joker had mentioned that it was a new development since Omega. You have to take pleasure in what you do, after all.

They set about the rhythmic process of bringing down enemy shields and penetrating them with rapidfire thermal slugs. Garrus' colourful commentary on his own prowess was amusing, but also helped her keep track of his progress on the part of the field he controlled. She trusted him, on many levels, not least of which was that she knew he would sooner die than let her be flanked.

She suddenly heard the sideways _wom wom wom_ of a biotic charging up an attack. She threw herself behind a wall; peripherally, she saw Garrus do the same. They locked eyes. She'd missed that one in her first assessment of the field. Must have arrived late.

She deployed her drone again, to the position she extrapolated was the origin of the blue ball that had nearly missed her, and settled in for the game of attrition that usually ensued when facing biotics. Shepard's specialized attacks made short work of tech, but biotic barriers were a slippery bitch.

Then her drone pinged back with a surprising message: "no enemy signals".

She craned out of cover to see Thane walking back toward them from what had once been enemy lines. His black coat and liquid strides sketched out the inky silhouette of a noir vigilante. Their biotic attacker was slumped with her head facing a very wrong direction.

"Clear," was Thane's understated announcement.

If Garrus had eyebrows, they would probably have been as raised as her own.

* * *

The justicar would only pledge herself to the mission in exchange for the recovery of some data from a smugglers' den. Thane found this surprisingly déclassé, but wisely preserved his silence. He knew little of the Code's position on assassins, but the troubled eezo pinpricking his capillaries told him that any duel with this biotic dreadnought would result in him fleeing for his remaining eight to twelve months. Best to wait to introduce himself until her loyalty is secured.

"I'm feeling pretty warmed up," Shepard said to her two companions. "Let's go pick up what Samara wants." Her even tone indicated neither undue glee nor concern for an impromptu infiltration into the heart of Eclipse activities on Illium. Garrus, in a turian battle flush, gave a slightly breathless, "Hell yeah."

Thane only smiled at her. Like any art, he intended to log many hours of practice at fighting by Shepard's side. Being a part of her relentless pressure wave was… invigorating.

Riding the elevator into the forbidden depths of the Eclipse nest, Thane felt turian eyes on him. It wasn't slow-dawning recognition from C-Sec case files: he was sensitive to this phenomenon, since his species could only ever be on one side of it. No, Thane identified it as a penetrating, evaluative look. After having proven himself as a compatible warrior, what could this be about?

The elevator ride stretched long, silent and tense, as it traversed the monolithic heights of Nos Astra's arcology. Shepard spent the time re-optimizing her omnitool for combat against asari biotics. Thane stood quietly, still as stone, allowing Garrus' stare to wash over him, surrendering nothing.

When the doors parted, they were in the crime syndicate's main facility, containers of biotics-enhancing toxins scattered without thought. Those crates will inevitably be caught in crossfire and burst, Thane thought. The resulting fog of Minagen X3 could do little to Shepard and the turian apart from make them clear their throats; no eezo flowed in their blood to react to the substance's properties. Despite this, as the firefight began and Thane's predictions proved correct, Shepard gave the expanding red clouds a wide berth, characteristic of her cautious approach to battle. Thane had little reason to seek out inhaling the drug, but in the final encounter, when the merc captain began hurling them at the squad, he decided not to dodge.

He breathed in a scent that was warm and spiced like Rakhana safflower. A feverish heat in his chest bloomed and slowly spread until his nerves were coursing with an excess of biotic energy. His body began to shimmer in a blue aurora. "Ah," he said softly to himself, and holstered his gun.

He formed a fist, and he felt space bend around his knuckles, throbbing like snug boxing wraps of warped physics. His hand gained its own blue corona, the glow concentrating into a blue orb as he opened his grasp. He directed it to fly towards an enemy.

It snapped to her with a disembodied urgency that startled even him. The scream was knocked from her lungs, her body flung to the side wall of the large room, tremendous momentum communicated in that palm-sized ball of light. She crumpled, every bone shattered with the impact, executed swiftly like a small animal being crushed.

Thane's glow persisted, flickering like a star warning of nova. Gunshots pinged harmlessly off his bolstered barrier.

He strode forth out of the cloud of red, and buffeted Eclipse mercs side to side, spattering them across any convenient surface. He kept an eye to cover, prepared to duck back into shadow once the drug's effects had passed, but they lingered in his body until the large room had been thoroughly drained of life. It was slaughter.

When the room went silent and the glow of his body faded, he bowed his head and prayed for forgiveness.

* * *

As far as Shepard was concerned, biotics were magic. She wasn't born with the gift, and had stopped feeling jealous about it by her teenage years. She had decided she was alright with having a mind that could achieve amazing things without needing a surgical implant drilled in the back of her skull.

She gave her omnitool a break now, however, because matters seemed to be taking care of themselves. Thane was mowing down the enemy stronghold, and it looked for all the world like they couldn't provide fodder fast enough for the outpouring of his drug-augmented energy. The walls were a gruesome work of modern art in blood, and they shook with the force of the biotic explosions Thane was detonating in groups of mercs huddled together.

Garrus had settled down in a sniper position and was guarding their exit, pointedly turned away from the drell's display. Shepard almost set a drone to film the action — keeping Thane and his Tai Chi superpowers well in frame — but decided that would make her a pervert.

The last red light on her radar blinked off, and Shepard stood from cover and walked to join the drell. "Do we need to find you some more punching bags?"

"The enemy gave us an advantage. I took it," Thane said simply — and then suddenly doubled over and coughed. A clot of dark red flew from his mouth to the floor, joining the blood splatters of enemy casualties. A clump of dust, or bloody lung tissue?

"Damn," said Garrus.

Thane's displeasure was knit across his brows. "My apologies," he said, gathering his dignity, standing upright and rolling his shoulders back. "Apparently it came at some cost."

Shepard spared him and broke eye contact, looking around the room. "One of these ragdolls used to be Captain Wasea. She may have the information on her."

Garrus set about examining the bodies in his methodical way. Shepard brushed near the drell and said, "Maybe have a visit with the doctor on the _Normandy_ when we get back." Then: "Ah, found it." The datapad was on the desk, naturally.

* * *

Shepard tossed herself into the seat opposite Chakwas in the med-bay. She swirled the glass of wine in one hand — not the good stuff, but something from the stash they often shared for a casual winding down of evenings — and read Thane's medical report, held in the other. Although technically the SR-2 was a private frigate, it was hard to break old military habits of disregarding doctor-patient privilege when a commanding officer wants to know.

"He's in extraordinarily good shape, never mind the Kepral's Syndrome," Chakwas volunteered, with a saucy raise of the eyebrow. Shepard tried to remain impassive, but she was by no means a gifted liar. Her thoughts had always cycled far too quickly to mitigate the subtle quirks of facial muscles, and she was notorious for broadcasting her sentiments across her forehead. This is why she had a wardrobe of tough-looking breather masks for situations where she suspected she would need to do some bluffing — although for the most part she tended to batter her way through negotiations with unapologetically blunt truthfulness. Honesty of that kind could be intimidating as hell.

So of course, Chakwas couldn't have missed Shepard's more than passing interest in Thane.

"That Minagen X3 is nasty stuff, though, especially on lungs riddled with lesions," the doctor said.

Shepard winced. 'Lesions' is a horrible word.

"He has already fully recovered from the exposure, which is rather impressive since his system probably got about four times the dose that a healthy set of lungs would have absorbed," Chakwas continued. "One can only imagine what that was like. He probably felt like some sort of… biotic god."

Shepard snorted. Chakwas gave her an inquiring look. "Later," Shepard said. "Tell me more about what it says here on transplants."

Chakwas leaned back and folded her arms. Her eyes darkened with consternation. "Sere Krios is eligible for a lung transplant that would halt all progression of Kepral's Syndrome in other organs, and fully rehabilitate all of his cardiovascular functions — after physiotherapy, of course. At his current stage of the disease, he could be classed as 'urgent need' and has a good chance of finding a compatible organ within six to eight months." At Shepard's expression of surprised impatience, the doctor explained, "The galactic drell population is still comparatively small. But it makes little difference, since he refused to be added to the list."

"Yeah, I see that," Shepard replied, tossing the datapad onto the desk. She was strangely irritated by the news, and not at the doctor per se. "Did he give a reason?"

Chakwas heaved a sigh. "'Why? Shall I deny some other patient a chance at life, only so that I might extend my time spent ending others'?'" Chakwas' imitation of the drell's melodic pacing was somewhat accurate: conveyed his penchant for vocal drama, at any rate.

Shepard's expression clouded. She saw his point, and empathized with him. If someone had asked her, would you like to be reconstructed as a Cerberus cyborg, at astronomical expense to a massive organization that could be spent instead actually _defending_ human colonies in the Terminus Systems, so that you could have more days spent huddling in the dark shooting at things? – would she have answered yes?

In the brief lull in their conversation, she concluded that yes, yes she would. She loved being alive, selfishly, freely. It didn't matter where she came from. Being alive was a beautiful thing, which is why she tended to get angry at people who killed unnecessarily.

Or was that just an inevitable rationalization? How could she go on otherwise, knowing what she knows?

It was a line of reasoning that bore further examination. Later.

"Now I know I'm not supposed to be the one doing psych reports on this particular incarnation of the _Normandy_," Chakwas ventured, interrupting Shepard's thoughts. "But I suspect he'll run loops around Chambers' dazzled little eyes, and at any rate he's well within healthy functioning parameters. So I must tell you, in my professional opinion, and bearing in mind that I'm not particularly well-versed in drell psychology…" She paused to sip at her wine, thoughtfully. "He's in a very dark place. He's isolated. I think he believes he deserves to die." And that's a liability, said the silence between them.

"Well he's not dying before this mission is completed," stated Shepard flatly, as she filed away her thoughts on this issue. "Thanks for the drink, and the highly illuminating conversation." She tossed back the rest of her wine. She didn't realize how brusque she had become; it was a bad habit when there was a lot on her mind. Chakwas acknowledged the familiar phenomenon with fond tolerance. "Another time, Commander," she said.

* * *

Commander Shepard was an introvert by nature, which is why she picked up the habit of making rounds about the ship to touch base with everyone she works with directly. The routine was designed to prevent her from constructing a bubble of command that left her insensate to any of the real issues of the crew.

But she found herself anticipating her visits with Thane.

Maybe it was because Life Support was so quiet and comfortable. There was nowhere to sit in Mordin's lab or Garrus' battery, but she could relax at Thane's table whenever she came around.

Kasumi has a couch, Shepard reminded herself. And she did adore Kasumi. But it wasn't the port observation lounge that gave her a thrill whenever she stepped off the elevator on the crew deck.

Pausing at the door to Life Support, she afforded herself a smile. Yes, she was attracted to the drell. Perhaps superficially, perhaps embarrassingly: she found him… compelling. In battle, he filled the gaps, provided for unexpressed needs, as though he were reading her thoughts in her body language. He was always positioned where she wanted him, before she could even call out the commands. Sometimes, he was in places she didn't even know she wanted him; close-quarters was usually a last resort for her style, but he would get personal with problematic hostiles and dispatch them like Gordian knots.

And on the ship, she couldn't get enough of that _voice_, of the way he spoke, the poetry and the formality of his words riding on waves of warm vibrations. He seemed almost _designed_, a dark protagonist from an old Earth novel, all black leather and poise. She could observe herself going weak-kneed for it like a teenage girl.

The teasing she got from Kasumi might also have been something that soured her feelings towards the port observation lounge.

It will probably pass. It's just a crush. Enjoy it while it lasts, she told herself.

The door opened, and there he was, as usual, sitting at his table with a lukewarm mug of strong tea, or something like it. Wait. There were two mugs on the table, one with curls of steam, one without.

What use does someone with Kepral's Syndrome have for steam?

"Shepard," he said without turning. "Do you need something?"

"Have a few minutes to talk?"

"Certainly," he said, and she slid into the seat across from him.

"You were expecting me," she said, unable to repress her grin.

"Of course," he said. "I could hear Kasumi's cackles next door."

Shepard had modified her route so that she would visit Kasumi first, to undercut her campaigns to make Shepard blush with questions about how her visit with Thane had gone.

But all Shepard said about that was, "Good ears." And then: "What are you drinking?"

"While in Nos Astra I was able to stockpile some popular herbal remedies for Kepral's Syndrome. The warmth feels good in the chest, and despite being a tea it tastes somehow… dry."

Shepard wasn't particularly enticed by the description.

"I am told that one is called 'English breakfast'," he said, nodding towards the mug closer to her.

* * *

Shepard's eyes lit up, like sunlight glinting off a curved sea horizon, and Thane knew he had done well. "How did you know?" She clasped the warm mug between her hands. Her fingers had no webbing; it made them seem so spindly and elegant.

He decided not to explain to her that the ability to track someone's routines was integral to his trade. His skills and eidetic memory made it impossible for him not to notice her preferences and habits. He had seen her ritualistically brew this tea in the mess on a pensive evening, when her duties were done for the day. He had marked the way she had added sweetener, and the drop of her shoulders as she relaxed into its aromatic veil.

He was unaccustomed to having a 'commanding officer', someone whose wishes he was accountable to beyond the singular end goal of a contract hit. That could be why he had desired her approval, desired her smile. But he had his doubts.

Sitting there, sharing drinks, he suddenly thought of Irikah. There had been too few moments like this with her.

_The table is small, circular. A decorative bowl houses colourful kelp. She had changed them that week, from green to orange. Kolyat cries. She puts down her mug and picks up the squalling child. She purrs at the small boy's face. My son's face._

_"I am leaving tomorrow," I tell her. She closes her eyes, blocking me out from her pain. "How long this time," she asks, resigned. Kolyat's screams are piercing, insistent._

"Thane?"

Shepard's voice. She spoke softly, but with a magnetic pull back to reality. Her lips were poised at the rim of her mug, slightly parted; her eyes, watching him.

"Forgive me," he said. He realized a need to explain himself, his species' habits, to her. He knew how rarely they were encountered beyond the cloud cover of Kahje. "Drell have perfect memories. We can relive any moment in our lives with perfect clarity. It's difficult to control at times. Sometimes we disappear into… let's call it solipsism."

He suddenly sensed that Shepard was holding her breath. She slowly lowered her mug to cradle it in both palms, looking at him with a strange intensity. It made his crest tingle.

Silence was usually his trusted ally, but something in her composure had become disquieting.

"I was… thinking of my wife," he said, surprising himself with his forthcomingness.

"You're married?" Shepard asked. Thane thought he heard a tiny raw edge in her voice.

He stood smoothly from his seat, moved to the racks of rifles and folded his hands behind his back. It would be easier to discuss this if he could remain more disengaged. "I was, once. I lost her to my own negligence. I stayed away too long, and my enemies came for her. She was killed."

The warmth of Shepard was suddenly at his side. "I'm so sorry," she said. He sensed her hand twitch to move to touch him, and then go limp.

Even he couldn't decide whether a touch would have been appropriate, but the ache in his chest told him that it would have been welcomed.


	3. Chapter 3

Thane stood by the airlock door, hands folded behind him. He observed the comings and goings of the Cerberus personnel on the CIC.

They were civilians, without a doubt. All experts in their chosen fields, but absent of the practiced rigidity of soldiers. Although they did their jobs well, they were chatty, frequently letting slip with personal anecdotes and private opinions. He closed his eyes and slipped into a minor meditative state, as he often did when his senses were awash with superfluous information.

He heard the muffled click of Miranda's heels as she strutted towards him from the elevator. This upcoming mission was a personal favour to her. The objective was to provide covert countermeasures for a sabotage effort on a family relocation: specifically, Miranda's younger cloned sister and her foster parents.

Thane marked the stutter and stop of a set of haptic interfaces, as one crewman — Crewman Matthews, his memory supplied — stopped to watch Operative Lawson as she passed him in the fore of the CIC.

Miranda was allegedly humanity perfected, designed in a genetic laboratory to optimize the best features of their species. From her interactions with the crew, it would seem that she was also built to appeal to their sense of beauty. No, not beauty: sexual attractiveness. Thane philosophically maintained that aesthetics are universal, and although Miranda was certainly symmetrical in construction, the exaggerated and unconstrained curves that she habitually flaunted were incompatible to his tastes. Perhaps it was the unmitigated _human_-ness of her appearance, pursued to its ultimate expression, that made her so delectable to others of her own race while seeming crude and bestial to him. She lacked the transcendent loveliness of– well, never mind.

Miranda nodded to him as she fell into position by the airlock door, and the two awaited the arrival of their Commander. Their punctuality, at least, was something they shared. She also, he realized, had his pity. She was a manufactured being: not the way he was, not through the kindly but rigorous training of the hanar, but drawn from a man's blood to serve as a trophy of his ego. Thane had been separated from his parents to honour them; Miranda ran from her father to honour herself.

He admired her resilience. Externally-attributed purpose could either become a lifelong guiding motif, or leave a person adrift. She had persevered and carved her own wake.

Thane settled back into stillness, listening to the quiet blips of terminal outputs, a continuous background aura like raindrops on the glass domes of Kahje.

"Matthews, get back to work. You're drooling," one crewman said, leaned over into Matthews' ear.

"Can you blame me? Goddamn!" Matthews said, his libidinous excitement making his whisper project further than he might have wanted — far enough for Thane's ear to catch it, from his position in the shadows. "And that alien is going on a mission alone with her and the Commander. Ugh, what I wouldn't give…"

"Watch yourself, Matthews," the other crewman said, amused enough to be only cursory with his warning.

"Those poor drell, can't catch a break. The guy needs a dry environment to live, but everywhere he goes, he makes the ladies wet, you know what I mean? –Agh!"

That last outburst was the result of being cuffed on the side of the head by Commander Shepard, striding up the corridor. "Next time I hear you say vulgar shit like that in my CIC, you're spaced," she said coolly, without turning back to look at him.

'Transcendent loveliness': only the right phrase to describe her from a species that worships warrior-goddesses.

* * *

The stakeout had been turned; Miranda's megalomaniacal father had been tipped off, and now the trio faced an army of overpaid mercs whose purpose was to delay them until the family could be delivered into the wrong hands.

They battled through a cargo terminal littered with obstructions to line-of-sight, so Thane holstered his sniper rifle and opted to supplement Miranda's biotics instead. Deft orbs of mass effect energy snapped from his hands to detonate her warp fields with deadly precision. Shepard read his tactic, and set to pistol-sniping barrels of explosive chemicals, igniting an inferno that would only appear chaotic to the uninitiated. Thane perceived how cleverly she steered mercs into his and Miranda's killing field, as surely as schools of fish directed by the net. He felt a distant hum of battle elation he had never known before; he imagined that he and Shepard were moving to some shared chorus. She would weave patterns in the flames, a text of bodies laid out in the field, illuminating to him the most elegant, the optimal method of sanitizing the room of their foes. No words were necessary as their abilities worked in complementary opposition.

There was a brief lull in the intermittent chains of her plasma attacks, and Thane felt it like an instrument dropping out of a symphony. He glanced over at Shepard through the reef of freight providing them cover. She was looking up: a strange direction to have drawn her focus. His curiosity aroused, he followed her gaze to a set of mechanical cargo cranes on criss-crossing ceiling tracks. She began to tap away on her omnitool, a glint in her eye.

"I read you, Shepard," Thane murmured into his radio, and she glanced up at him in surprise. He moved swiftly from his position, avoiding the sight-lines of the enemy as he ascended a tall ladder to match the altitude of one of the crates hanging from a stationary crane. A fluid lateral jump brought him to land lightly atop the crate, which swung only mildly under his well-balanced impact. A moment later, the crane shuddered into motion at the behest of Shepard's network intrusion.

Thane stretched himself prone on the top of the crate, tucking his sniper rifle to his chin. The track brought the hovering crate in an angular path along the flank of where the mercs had dug into cover. One after the other, the throats of the mercs came into scope; he squeezed the trigger and planted a thermal slug in each of them. For the final, bewildered target, he holstered his rifle, rose to his feet, and stepped easily off the edge of the crate. He rebounded with a push of his knees off an opposite wall to fall upon the shoulders of his mark, his hands falling naturally into place to execute a tidy neck-snap before the merc hit the ground.

The room was quiet now. Shepard's boots sounded on the concrete floor as she crossed the space to join him. "Nice work," she said, the half-curve of her smile denoting it an understatement.

He and Miranda were both more than competent warriors. On their own, they might even have had a fighting chance at completing this mission. The effect of Shepard's presence, really, was as a facilitator, transforming an uphill battle into a flash flood streaming down a mountainside wadi, unrelenting and unopposable. She was an artist, and Thane did not know if he was a collaborator, or merely part of the material she worked. Around her, he was a supplicant, suffused with inspiration from this incarnation of Arashu's fire.

The measure of their mission success was that a teenaged girl and her family noticed nothing. This was about as much recognition as Thane preferred to get from any of his jobs.

Watching the family safely board their transport, Thane stood back and listened quietly as Miranda gave Shepard all the reasons why it would be senseless for her to go to Oriana and strike up a conversation now. It was better that the girl never know where she came from, and all the heartache and corruption around her birth and life. Better that the girl never know she has a sister who is a Cerberus operative.

Shepard listened, regarded Miranda for a long moment, and then said, "Okay."

The Commander was plainly uninterested in managing the other woman's family relationships. But the hunger and loss with which Miranda looked at her sister across the plaza stirred a memory in Thane.

_Kolyat's eyes, sullen at the funeral. It always rains on Kahje._

_Irikah's sister purses her lips in that same familiar way. His heart aches. "Please," he begs her. "My skills do not suit the raising of a child."_

_Kolyat's eyes. My son._

Thane was watching Miranda, the estranged, unloved daughter, walk away from the one person she still had to fight for.

"Shepard," Thane said, as they exited the elevator to the docking area, "I shall meet you back aboard the ship. I have to make a few calls."

* * *

Thane's pride had kept him from hiring an information broker to track his own son, but still, time would be short before his absence from the _Normandy_ was felt. This favour for Miranda was the last of their business on Illium — at least foreseeably — and he had a few hours at most before they would be ready to shove off.

The comm booth's partition dented under the impact of Thane's fist. A bad habit, when he was this angry. But he rarely raised his voice. "Clarify," he uttered with the same steely control as an edged weapon.

The volus on the other end of the comm was overtaxing his breather, sucking in air fast and nervous. He was trying to explain to the galaxy's top-ranked assassin about the loopholes that had permitted Kolyat to access his package, despite that Thane had not authorized its release. In this case, 'authorizing release' meant 'dying'. As far as Thane could tell, 'loopholes' meant 'threats of physical violence'. Brutes, all of them. His son included.

The package had contained a log of Thane's career, all identifying markers of clients and targets removed, and a sentimental note to his son which he had struggled with writing for weeks. It was to be his post-mortem apology. And Kolyat had broken into it, taken the log entries and scrapped the letter. Thane could only imagine the hurt and angry expression on his son's face. Actually, he could only imagine his son's face at all: nearly a grown man now, and only a patchwork impression from surveillance vids and rare contact with his sister-in-law.

"Thank you for your time," he said icily to the volus, and closed the link. Locating his son would require other channels which suited the _Normandy_'s communications protocols much better. He vanished into the crowd.

* * *

"Hey, Shepard."

It was Garrus' voice, beckoning softly to her as she stood in the kitchen of the _Normandy_'s crew deck. Shepard often had the thought that turians sound like a targeting VI that had smoked too many batarian cigarettes; something about the plating around their resonators gave them a persistent metallic growl. Usually this resulted in a grizzled cadence that made them seem tough and militaristic, but Vakarian's had something more like the purr of a mechanical tomcat.

Shepard took her bowl of oatmeal and followed Garrus into his den: naturally, the room on the ship that had the biggest guns. "What can I do for you, Garrus?" she asked.

She noticed his brief pause until the doors to the battery closed behind her.

He opened with a sigh that was like the flanging of the wind over loose skycar plating. "Shepard. I know you don't like to talk about the past three years. Or for you, one year. Or– whatever."

Shepard dropped her gaze, spooning her oatmeal around in her bowl. It was true, but she hadn't realized he'd noticed, or was being sensitive to it. It would explain their easy camaraderie, when her relationships with Tali and Joker had retained a damaged undercurrent.

"So I'll be brief," Garrus continued, and Shepard sensed that it was as much for his sake as hers. "This is about the two years while you were… MIA."

Shepard was grateful for the euphemism.

The conversation was a confession. Garrus felt responsible for the death of his team on Omega, but Shepard sensed that even they weren't the first void in his heart. He looked away from her when he said that going to that station, forging an opportunity to enact justice without regulations, had been an "almost perfect fit". He was chasing something — some thrill perhaps? — after the Battle of the Citadel had ended. Could it have been the team dynamic of the _SSV Normandy_? The idealism of their single-minded dedication? The high-stakes adrenaline? She had no insight; she had been a part of it, but she felt like she hadn't actually _been_ there.

One word Garrus didn't use was 'assassination'. Garrus sought to kill Sidonis, the turian who had betrayed him and led his team to death. His lead was a crook on the Citadel named Fade who specialized in making people disappear, and had performed this service for Garrus' target. The hint was subtle, but she took it; when they docked at the station, Shepard left Thane on the _Normandy_. The drell's practiced expertise at being the arm of a revenge killing would probably drain any of the satisfaction for Garrus, and ultimately satisfaction was the real goal.

In Thane's place, Shepard invited Jack. The ex-convict had recently come to know the catharsis of revenge, and so Shepard thought it fitting. She had also become accustomed to Thane's biotics for quick rescues at short range.

That particular use of biotic abilities never came up as they broke into Fade's hideout and swatted aside his personal defence force, due to Jack's tendency to blaze ahead and murder everything in her path before Shepard could even lay eyes on their foes. Shepard adjusted her tactics into a form of morbid Whack-A-Mole: Jack's shockwaves flung swaths of enemies out of cover and into the air for Garrus to pick off in a deadly turian adaptation of skeet shooting. He was getting very good at it. Knowing him, he was probably cooking up a challenge for Shepard of this particular skill.

This left Shepard to manage all the angles: watch the flank with one eye and her radar with the other, taking opportunities to scout ahead by hacking well-located enemy mechs and seeing through their optics — and shooting through their guns. Her voice was in Jack's ear through the radio, directing her to where the enemies hid so she could go have her violent way with them. For the most part, Shepard and Vakarian were back-to-back in the trenches, alone together, with Jack as a deadly kite which they could reel in to their position or let fly as necessary.

"Forty," Garrus said, masking a boyish thrill.

"Huh?" Shepard asked, turning an ear toward him.

"Forty midair headshots in a row," Garrus explained with false nonchalance, reloading his Mantis with a flourish.

"Nice," Shepard said.

"Aw c'mon, 'nice'? That the best you can do for the most amazing sharpshooting you've ever seen?"

"You do have style, Garrus."

"I _bleed_ style. Unless there's a gunship involved. Then I just bleed."

Shepard laughed, and leaned back against the mech storage box they were sharing for cover. She propped her omnitool wrist on one knee, deftly hacking another LOKI to get a better bearing of the battlefield. She felt Garrus' eyes on her.

She suddenly heard a cry as a body slammed into the ground after Jack's shockwave. Of course, headshotted corpses don't shout.

"Sounds like you missed one, Vakarian," she said.

"Damn! You distracted me with your… blinking lights."

"You can spank it to your Shepard vids later, Garrus," said Jack's voice over the radio. "Heads up for a couple of YMIR mechs."

Shepard could only assume that that particular mandibular configuration was the turian expression for 'mortified'. "What, you need to augment your body count with friendly fire now?" Shepard jokingly rebuked the ex-con.

The two heavy mechs were Fade's last-ditch effort to delay them so he could escape. It was utterly futile; Shepard hacked one and turned the battle into a kaiju deathmatch for her squad's entertainment.

As the last mech burst into shrapnel, Shepard turned to see Garrus' head bent, eyes closed, his forehead touching the barrel of his cocked rifle. The moment between battle's climax and the beginning of denouement: it was an intimate thing to witness. He opened his eyes and regarded her. Turian faces are hard to read, but she felt his whole heart in his gaze. His mandibles parted as though he was about to speak, but instead he silently rose to his feet. It was a long moment before he murmured to her, "Shepard. Let's get this thing done."

* * *

It was all too easy, as though karma were running on hard times and needed to collect. Sidonis was on the Citadel. One phone call from Fade was all it had taken to draw him out. Shepard wasn't sure why she felt troubled about letting Garrus pull the trigger; after all, that's what they had come there to do. It had gone exactly how he'd planned: clean and surgical.

As they returned to the _Normandy, s_he turned to look at him, patted him roughly on the shoulder, the scarred neck of his armour. She felt reassured by the harmonic turian sigh she heard, and the way he was carrying himself. He stood a little straighter, his head a little less bent by grief. The three long digits of his hand touched her gently at the elbow. "Thank you, Shepard." He looked at her searchingly, then turned to put away his gear.

Shepard strode through the CIC, eager to head up to her cabin and change into her ship clothes. She was intercepted by Kelly Chambers.

"Commander, you have new messages at your private terminal."

Shepard nodded. Great, she'll read them upstairs.

"Also, Thane would like to speak to you."

This gave Shepard pause. Thane would know her routine, that she would be down there like clockwork within 45 minutes of returning from a mission. Why was he leaving notification with Kelly?

"Thank you, Kelly," she said, and walked into the elevator. The door shut behind her.

She regarded the options on the panel. Going down, or going up?

* * *

Thane had found it uncharacteristically difficult to meditate while Shepard was on a mission without him. He found himself pacing in front of his gun rack. It was the first time she had not included him in her squad, and so the first time he experienced this. He felt strangely thwarted and purposeless, denied the opportunity to be at her side, to continue to study at her feet, to continue to prove to her how well he could understand the artful nuance of her methods.

Surely, better than the turian could.

This preoccupation, he considered, may be merely a defensive trick of the mind; it was warding him away from his other concern, which was too personal and painful even to approach in the murky depths of his psychological seascape. Joining her would mean crossing onto the Citadel, and meeting in battle all the old ghosts of his past ineptitudes. Nevertheless, he had paged Yeoman Chambers for an update on mission status, and when they might expect the Commander back aboard — and then immediately berated himself for acting on his impatience.

Shepard was carrying her own chestplate when she entered Thane's room. It was the only piece of her armour she had removed aside from her helmet, baring the collared skintight bodysuit layered underneath. The bulk of her shoulder guards and greaves only contrasted more sharply with the sweeping curves of her narrow waist. When Miranda minced around in her bodysuit, it was vulgar; here, Shepard was unselfconscious and, truth be told, unutterably sexy.

It was not going to make this conversation any easier.

"Is there something wrong?" she asked, bending to set down the chestplate by the door.

With her body? Not a single thing. No– Kelly must have said something. That is why she is here.

"Yes," he admitted. "Now that you are here, though, it seems more… difficult to talk about." A small confession, to prepare himself for the bigger one. Never having discussed his problems with another being before, he could not have anticipated how much of a challenge it would be to put his suffering into words.

"Take as much time as you need," she said. She stripped off her gauntlets and placed them inside the empty chestpiece. Thane folded his hands together behind his back, turning to look through the window at the flickering tendrils of the engine core.

"I have a son," he said, in a careful monotone. "His name is Kolyat. I haven't seen him for a very long time."

The creaking of kinetic padding ceased behind him. He felt Shepard's footsteps bring her closer. "Did something happen to him?" she asked softly.

"When my wife departed from her body ten years ago, I… attended to that issue. I left Kolyat in the care of his aunts and uncles. I have not seen or talked to him since."

He felt Shepard's eyes on him. He turned his head slightly. In his peripheral vision, he saw her expression: sympathetic, non-judgmental. Her beautiful, dark eyes and luminous white sclera. Her gaze spurred him to continue.

"My body is blessed with the skills to take life. I have few others. I didn't want that life for Kolyat. I hoped he would find his own way. If he hated me, so be it."

The words were coming more easily now. He turned to face Shepard. "I used my contacts to trace Kolyat. He has become… disconnected. He does what his body wills."

Shepard's lips pursed briefly as she parsed the metaphor. "What's wrong with him? Is he hurt?"

"Something happened that should not have." Frustration wrestled within his soul, but Thane maintained his discipline. "He knows where I've been, what I've done. I don't know his reasons, but he has come to the Citadel. He's taken a job as a hit man. I'd like your help to stop him. He is… this is not a path he should walk."

He had stated his case more succinctly than he had expected of himself. He had little practice at asking for help. Perhaps it was easier in this case because, in truth, he didn't actually need her help. He desired it.

These past weeks, when Shepard continued to select him for missions when any number of other squad members would have been more than sufficient, he had come to understand that. He was not necessary for the success of the mission, but she had desired him to be a part of it. These shared experiences had been valuable to him in ways he couldn't have predicted.

"Absolutely, Thane," Shepard said, as unhesitating as ever. "Tell me when you're ready to go."

Thane bent his head. The weight had not lifted from him completely, but the burden felt lighter.

Shepard did not move from his side.

He turned to look at her again. The white lights from his gun racks shimmered on her cheekbones, her skin smooth like the glow of the hanar. His hands had gripped a great number of human jaws, always a split second prior to a fatal neck-snap; but the males who made up most of his tally were usually textured with a grotesque thatch of facial hair. He had never contemplated the silken contours of their women — the softness of her cheek, the faint lines of scars leading the eye to the plump pink flesh of her mouth–

This time he remembered to look away. He moved back to sit at his table. Shepard followed suit. The joints of her greaves creaked as she sat in the small chair.

"I have one question though: you don't hire a raw rookie for a contract killing," Shepard said, pointing out one of the anomalies of his story.

The distance he needed to traverse to bring his mind back to the subject at hand, shamed him.

"I'm afraid someone may have seen that we share a name, and assumed that we share skills. I don't know why he would accept the task."

"To be closer to you, maybe?"

Like a knife in the heart. "That thought haunts me more than any other."

Shepard reached across the table and grasped one of his hands. Her hand was so warm, like the gleaming alloys of Kahje's biodomes in the radiant summertime. Human homeostasis was far more specific than drell's, preferring a particular body temperature that ran hot compared to most of the starfaring races. He was reminded of the heat stones provided to him by the hanar when he was a child, something to curl up with in bed at night, something to approximate a drell's natural habitat in the otherwise cold, damp compound.

He thought of curling up next to Shepard at night, and his fingers squeezed hers involuntarily.

"We'll find him, Thane," she said, in her soft alto voice.

* * *

Shepard was grateful that it was only a few steps from Life Support to the elevator, and then to the quiet privacy of her quarters. She slung her chestplate into her armour locker, and then sat at the edge of her bed, carelessly unzipping the neck of her bodysuit. She needed to breathe.

She needed a cold shower, actually.

Thane was the first drell she had ever met, but she had scanned the pertinent files about his species before tracking him down. There was nothing in there about the intensity of their black gazes, or the quiet drama with which they carried themselves.

Or was that just him?

Listening to him speak about his son, his profound sorrow barely contained in his carefully measured tones, it was the worst possible moment for her to be distracted by… personal thoughts. There was a flood of them, a cacophony of themes in her mind.

Thane, the father. The husband. The more she learned about the life he had lived, his struggles, his difficult decisions, the more attracted to him she became. Thane may have had a dysfunctional family life, wracked by tragedy — but no one else she knew had even tried to start a family in the first place. Practically everyone she worked with since leaving Mindoir — (so her unreliable memory told her) — had that particular military single-mindedness: obsession with a mission, with a question, with collectivism. Even if he may have failed, Thane had tried his damnedest to balance his career with the safety of his family. He had given someone all of his love and promised her his life, and made a child with her and loved him too. Still loved him.

Shepard had endured a great many strange and horrible things, but the act of making a family seemed elusively mature to her, and by that token enormously, irresistibly attractive.

She had never really questioned the hero's lifestyle she followed, sacrificing sentimentality for a career, floating with no personal attachments, free to chase down more and more urgent missions; in fact she had only gotten more detached and abstracted since her… reconstruction.

Shepard, the secret blank slate. If she had ever nurtured a secret plan to settle down with someone, it had died with her in space. It was fitting: even when she woke up, she was still in an untethered freefall, lost in a solitary void. After the pieces of her body were stitched together, her life became about grappling with and gathering the debris of the galaxy, building something for her to stand on, a team to fight with. The trials of her daily life made her insubstantial past irrelevant; the looming suicide mission made her future potentially moot.

Then here comes Thane with his perfect drell memory, who shifts from gazing at her with burning intensity, memorizing every detail of her posture, and then suddenly being lost within himself. "We can relive any moment in our lives with perfect clarity." He could immerse himself at will, with flawless fidelity, into any physical experience of the past. A lifetime, so hazy and indistinct for Shepard, was for him a library of present moments.

Thane, whose life was so rich and yet so near its end. Shepard, who could not be sure she had even lived her own.

At least in Thane's final moments, his perfectly accurate highlights reel would include things like having a _baby_. Shepard's deathbed flashback would only be an unmitigated parade of explosions, objectives long forgotten, all bleeding together into a vague and purposeless nihilism.

If she were so lucky to have a deathbed, and not just the numb solitude of space and the hiss of a malfunctioning life support pack as it depressurizes.

She pressed the ball of her hand into her eye. No. More pleasant matters. She lay back on the bed and tried to relive the conversation she had just had, but even now his exact word choices were slipping from her inadequate human memory into a general gloss. In her mind now, it was a catalogue of restraint: moments when she managed not to wrap her arms around him and try to steal away his pain. She found herself skipping ahead to when she finally permitted herself one gesture, and took his hand.

His hand, strong and roughly textured: hands that she knew contained tremendous power and talent, equally as capable of fluid precision as brute force. She felt his thumb press against her and run along her skin. At the time, it made her heart leap; remembering it now, it gave her gooseflesh.

This was her version of drell solipsism.

She had somehow unzipped her bodysuit all the way to her navel, but she would need to remove her greaves before she could get out of it. Huh. That's funny.

The private shower was without a doubt the best perk of command.


	4. Chapter 4

Thane and Shepard cited 'private business' as they took their shore leave on the Citadel together. A coy look from Kasumi was hushed by a sharp glance from the Commander — and also, no doubt, by Thane's own brooding tension.

The Zakera Ward docking bay was filled with tourists stumbling into one another in wide-eyed distraction, but Thane watched Shepard move smoothly through the atrium as though she shared his perfect memory of the place. The Citadel's changeless stability was familiar to them both, even the way that sameness contraposed a state of constant flux maintained by the silent custodianship of the Keepers. Structures shifted, and spaces opened and closed, according to the inscrutable judgments of those synthetic insectoids, but their efforts seemed to be solely towards maintaining a certain immutability, as they smoothed over and burnished away any major modifications by Citadel residents. The entire multi-armed structure of the Citadel was like an enormous dune of sand: fluid, composed of particulates that were constantly changing, but with an enduring mass that remained identical to the eye. And like the shadowy niches of such sand-hills, the Citadel was habitat to a variety of rare lifeforms, host to a network of relationships that could exist nowhere else in the galaxy. The darkened docking area was populated with a glossary of spacefaring races, all lit from about mid-level (depending on a species' stature); illumination issued from ship-lights and stardust through occasional broad windows, as well as the flickers of the ubiquitous glowing cylinders of advertisement towers, giving everyone an artificial fluorescence in a world without a sky.

The Citadel was the de facto capital of the Milky Way, and in the early years of Thane's career, just as it was starting to show its rapidly upward trajectory, the station began to serve more and more as a home base for his work. A certain type of politically-active elite would almost never leave the island of civilization that the Citadel represented, swathed in the purplish glow of the Serpent Nebula like a safety blanket. They constituted a large bourgeois bulge in his clientele, and he quickly found that the mid-to-high compensation they offered was not proportionate to difficulty. The unpredictable street fighting of an Omega mob hit could be far more hazardous than the repetitious sterility of cycling through the common Citadel private security firms. After a few years of infiltrating grandiose Presidium apartments, he began to challenge himself to use exclusively non-lethal force on private guards; a few years later, this challenge neutralized itself when he found that guards would readily turn a blind eye to his established modus operandi, finding his trust more worthy year-to-year than the flippant and finicky Citadel upper class. Thane had walked away from enough bodies on the station to know C-Sec regulations better than the average beat officer — although, granted, he was a very quick study.

Now, the intractable sameness of the Citadel frustrated him, burned a smouldering brazier of rage, low in his chest. Passing through the security checkpoint, he spotted no fewer than fourteen flaws he could exploit to enter the station proper untracked, if he so desired; eight of them were ones he regularly employed a decade ago. C-Sec's bluster and incompetence seared him from the inside. They were meant to be a force for justice here, but they were a sham when it came to the truly dangerous. No, he could not trust them to preserve the life of his son. They would only be there to incarcerate him once his soul was already rendered impure.

Shepard did not seem to share his cynicism. On the other side of security, she turned immediately to a desk manned by a certain Captain Bailey. A less disciplined assassin might have faltered — after all, officers of the law were his natural enemy, and it was not his practice to make his face known to them. But he stood by his commander with his well-enforced, customary coolness.

"My associate's trying to find his son. We think a local criminal may have hired him." She laid out the situation with a blunt honesty that could only come from having absolutely no fear of reprisal. Yes, she could speak for her companion while he stood anonymously by her side. Yes, she could expect answers of this Captain, because she was Commander fucking Shepard.

He observed her as she easily navigated conversation with Captain Bailey, and it struck him that a Spectre would be a natural ally in this phase of his life. She could operate outside the law, much as he did, only she was Council-sanctioned; her official role was a legitimation of his goals since retirement. She had a title where he had only a mantra.

_The universe is a dark place. I'm trying to make it brighter before I die._

Her title seemed to be enough for Bailey, who readily supplied them with a solid lead. Mouse. He just gave her the information — no coercion, no questions. It was effortlessly non-manipulative.

Shepard was a hero of civilization who could crew her ship with thieves and mercs. She could trespass any world, lulling this just-met C-Sec officer into friendship as easily as she had a frantic Subject Zero. It was a wonder she ever needed to use her gun. Yes, bringing her, the facilitator, had certainly changed the parameters of this errand. Now, the imminent reality of facing his son loomed in his vision, choked him.

As they stalked through Level 27 together, Thane felt Shepard's eyes on him. She was quiet, concerned. He stared ahead, scanning the crowd for the person they were meant to intercept. He could not bear to look at Shepard; he feared he would fall to his knees, wrung by opposing twists of gratitude and despair. Like the blazing flames of Arashu, her presence and warmth sustained him, but he felt his eyes would burn if he looked directly upon her.

_An advantage to working alone,_ he thought,_ is having no temptation to sob in despair on my partner's shoulder._

Amonkira be praised, the lead was true and the youth stood outside the Dark Star. It really was Mouse: the same skinny boy whose eyes used to shine expectantly, hoping for gifts of food, or simple toys. _He is always underfoot. I feel him checking my pockets. _Thane wrestled himself free of the memory, focused on the present moment. Mouse was a grown man now. Kolyat would be of a similar age and stature.

Rage bubbled unbidden to the surface of his mind. He wanted to lash out, grab Mouse and shake him, a litany of questions spitting from him.

_What have you done with my boy?_

_Why has my precious son's life merged with your vagrancy?_

_How was I a better father to this orphan than to my own son? – And yet they still both grew up to be petty criminals on the Citadel wards? _

_How had it all gone so wrong?_

But most urgently:_ Who is the target whose death will mark the end of my boy's innocence?_

He would have threatened Mouse for the intel, directed all of that anger into an interrogation– but Shepard was there.

The kid nearly dropped his datapad when he turned and recognized the drell. "Oh shit, Krios! I thought you retired!" A pause, before his voice cracked in shock. "Commander Shepard? I thought you died!" His throat pulsed with the panic of cornered prey, his eyes flicking between them. "What do you want with me?"

Mouse had not lived an easy life, but this conversation was already not going well, even for him.

Thane grabbed him by the collar, barely damping down his own ferocity. "You gave another drell instructions for an assassination. Who's the target?"

Mouse began to stammer, his mouth working like a minnow cornered in a reef. Thane felt the blood thump in his fists. There was no time for this– he would make him talk. But Shepard rolled her shoulders back and asserted her presence: powerful, undeniable, full of contradictions.

"Kid, you know who we are. We're not just some thugs. You give us what we want, we can tie this all up, neatly. There won't be any loose ends to bite you in the ass later. I give you my word."

Her word, it seemed, existed somewhere between threats and promises, and lay at the altar of reason.

She was no taller than Mouse, but it only meant she could easily lock eyes with him. She cowed him with the overwhelming force of her will. Just a moment's worth of her full attention was enough. He relented and shared what he knew.

The ability to walk away with both a name and no ill will from Mouse was already a tremendous coup.

The name was Elias Kelham. Not the target, but the client. Maybe Thane would be able to sink his fists into this one.

* * *

The C-Sec interrogation chair was originally designed to accommodate biotic suspects. It wasn't enough to disarm a biotic: it was necessary to restrain them, to prevent them from activating the gestural mnemonics that triggered their attacks. So it was already excessive to put Kelham in one of those, a human with no biotic ability.

Thane's mind buzzed with a hundred painless ways to kill him, while he was clamped down in that position — and a hundred more that were not so painless.

He suddenly realized that he could not trust himself to extract the crucial information from this man.

"Shepard. We should question him together. Keep the pressure on. Thoughts on how we approach it?"

He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time since they'd boarded the station. She returned his gaze with a smile, a flash of white teeth. "Convince him that we'll put a bullet in his head if he doesn't talk. Isn't that how interrogations work?" Her easy demeanour was a transparent attempt to add some levity to the situation.

"Very well. I'll pretend we're ready to kill him," he replied humourlessly.

She didn't correct him, one way or another.

Of course. N7s do things a little differently.

"We can't push too hard though. We need the information more than we need a corpse," Thane said, the words bitter in his mouth. It would be so easy to punish this defiler of his son, to tip Kelham over the familiar precipice of death. The fantasy shamed him; worse, he knew it promised gratification that it could never deliver. He had already walked that path for Irikah. But that time– Irikah was already dead. Kolyat could still be saved.

Still, the thought was potent.

Shepard didn't waver. She swung her helmet back on. The eye-slits glowed blue and angular on her face.

They entered the room together.

And there he was: small-time crime lord Elias Kelham, the wretch who had hired his son for an assassination. Thane folded his hands behind his back, his face impassive. Shepard looked at him, and he experienced a brief flash of worry that she could see through his façade to the roiling waters underneath.

She merely adopted his posture and circled the room to stand near Kelham's head.

Opposite Shepard, Kelham's prone body between them, Thane could almost hear the throbbing of the man's vital organs, and all the pressure points where he might coax an embolism to bloom with some precise finger-jabs. His mind occupied thus, Shepard had already started talking.

"My name's Shepard. I'm a Spectre."

It was a classroom introduction, with some very serious content.

"Prove it," Kelham said, maintaining his thug bravado after hearing a woman's voice issuing from the bug-faced helmet.

The Carnifex came out, and Shepard offered it to Kelham's nose for inspection. "I don't have to prove anything. Spectres are above the law. We clear?"

There was nothing more impassive than her Death Mask.

"Crystal," Kelham replied, and when Shepard asked what they needed to know, he provided all of the answers in one breath. The target was Joram Talid, a turian politician from the 800 blocks who built his platform on human-hating bigotry. Thane felt his anger bubble off and neutralize: this was the last lead they would need to chase. Kolyat would be there.

It was also, frankly, a pleasure to watch the woman work. Thane was a man who could appreciate efficiency.

"Thanks. You won't see us again. No offence, but you're a problem below my pay grade," Shepard said, already exiting the room.

"That may go down in history as the shortest interrogation ever," Thane said once outside the room, his heart already lightened.

"I don't fuck around," said Shepard.

* * *

Shepard could do a lot of things. She could shoot the head off a mech while hacking and remote-controlling its neighbour. The galaxy's top assassin just commended her on the shortest interrogation ever. Hell, she'd died and come back to life. But she was less than thrilled with this plan of having Thane depend on her lurking on maintenance catwalks to track Joram Talid.

It made some sort of tactical sense. He was the one who could go invisible in a crowd in a split second. In fact, she'd seen him do that immediately prior to her attempt to voice her concerns about this plan, to her great annoyance. As the goddamn reincarnated war hero celebrity, she'd take her jewel-toned blue armour and skulk around in the air above a shopping district, and hope nobody looked up.

She thought about deploying a drone to hover near Talid and ping her his location, but that would both be cheap and probably give them away. She had to face facts: she had no tools here except her own eyes.

"Fuck," she breathed to herself. She was accustomed to operations that were do-or-die with no second chances, but she was less accustomed to those which involved being stealthy amidst the Citadel's teeming civilian masses. Usually she could lean on her notoriety to get what she wanted, rather than relying on fading into the shadows. She could also usually count on large explosions as a backup plan.

Furthermore, her motivations were coming from a different place. Saving the galaxy was straightforward, as far as incentives go; this was much more personal. The kid was a faceless target to her, but the ache in Thane's heart was real. She couldn't allow herself to fail and become the cause of his unresolved pain. That worry accelerated the blood in her veins like the spinning rings of a mass relay.

Why were there so many goddamn unnecessary doors up here? Only the Reapers could have been the architects of such frustratingly evil design.

There were a few adrenaline-soaked moments as she stepped through yet another extraneous door and thought she'd lost the target. Steeling herself each time, her eyes would eventually fix upon that bigoted fuck and his big dumb bodyguard.

She tried to let some of her tension melt away as her objective stopped to chat up some voters outside a shop. She mused on whether the turian had an eerie sense of somebody watching him. She was barely blinking as her eyes bored down the back of his fringe.

The consolation prize for having this role in the stakeout was Thane's voice in her radio. At regular intervals, he would check in, make sure she still had Talid in her sights, and let her know where he was taking up position.

Shepard had always been a stickler for good audio, and the radio in her helmet was reproducing the subharmonics of Thane's voice very nicely. Hearing him in her ear built a nest of warm feelings in her belly.

"Do you have him?" Thane asked her.

"Mmm hmm," she replied, perhaps more langourously than was in any way appropriate.

Then the bodyguard finished his shakedown in the nearby shop, and the pair took off down the hallway.

"Oh fuck." Her boots clanged on the maintenance catwalks as she pursued them. She wished for and discarded a design for a noise-cancelling pulse. No time.

"I see them," came Thane's voice in her ear, and she exhaled in relief, slowing her pace just enough to mitigate some of the din from her footsteps. Looks like they were going into a bar anyway; no one would be able to hear her over the loud turian pop in there.

It was good and shadowy in the bar, and she felt less like a glimmering sapphire anomaly in the sky. She strolled along the catwalks to keep up with her targets. They should be on the other side of this door–

"Hey! Who are you? What are you doing back here?"

The upstairs room was actually being used by the bar. Shepard's talent for timing had brought her here exactly when some chump kid was taking inventory.

"Wh- what am I doing here?" _I _won't_ lose my quarry._ "What are _you_ doing here?"

The kid stared at her. "What?" The word came at the speed of his thoughts: rather slowly.

So she went with it. "Do you have any idea how dangerous it is here?"

"Dangerous?"

Excellent. "Get out of here!"

He looked at her.

"Now! Before it blows!" _Yessss_. With a flourish.

"Blows? What the–"

"Run!"

And the kid took off.

Shepard's laughter hissed out of her. Over the open channel, she heard a soft "hm!" of amusement.

She passed through the opposite set of doors, and Talid was there, keying in to an apartment. And so was a drell. Not Thane.

How had they missed him?

Kolyat pulled a weapon.

In that moment, Shepard was bare. She had no tools. She didn't know how to stop him without harming him.

But she had the tools she was born with. Or, at least, was reconstructed with.

"Kolyat!" she shouted, her voice ringing from above and resonating on the mysterious Reaper alloys of the Citadel walls. Her cry was enough to startle him into hesitation. It cost him a line of fire on Talid, and he settled for the krogan bodyguard, who went down a lot quicker than they usually did.

Hmm. Maybe the talent for killing was hereditary after all. Or maybe the kid just shouldn't press his luck a second time.

She negotiated over the railing and slid down to the pedestrian level, just as Thane's sprint caught up to her. They kept pace with one another in a dead run into Talid's apartment.

And that's how she found herself in a pistol stand-off, holding up Thane's son from executing a turian bigot.

* * *

Thane's heart turned to ice as he saw his son holding a gun to the back of Talid's head, the turian kneeling before him. And then Shepard, like an angel of justice, her own pistol levelled at Kolyat, unwavering. The lights of the C-Sec skycars brought Captain Bailey's men, with their own firearms. Kolyat, at the nexus of all of these weapons. Thane wanted nothing more than to step up and swaddle his son in his arms, and absorb all of the slugs into his body. He envisioned round after round emptying into him, until there were no more mistakes to be made, and Kolyat could walk away, reborn.

He could see no other way out of it. He took a step towards him, saying words, but it wouldn't matter what–

A shot rang out. Thane felt cold fear drain into his bloodstream. But what fell– a lampshade?

"What the hell–"

Kolyat's astonishment was interrupted by a swift elbow to the side of the head, while he was simultaneously disarmed. It wasn't elegant, but Shepard had moved fast enough to surprise Thane Krios. No mean feat.

Talid scrambled to safety, but no one cared enough to notice.

"Kolyat," Thane said softly, reaching out to his son.

"Is this some sort of joke? Now? Now you show up?" Kolyat said, seething with ten years of frustration, rage, abandonment, and now a sharp impact to the head. "You weren't there when my mother died! Or even when she was alive!" His pitch was climbing, unsteady, the hysteria of childhood pain wresting any semblance of self-control from him. Thane's heart ached.

"Your mother."

_Irikah. Irikah, nursing their newborn son. Irikah, with the sunset-coloured eyes. Irikah, who trembled with righteousness. Irikah, sinking into the Deep, with the hanar's mournful song._

"They killed her to get to me. It was my fault."

The room went still and breathless, broken intermittently by the blinking of the squad car lights outside.

"After her body was given to the Deep, I went to find them. The trigger-men, the ringleaders. I hurt them. Eventually killed them."

Kolyat's face was contorted, agonized, as he began to understand where his father had gone while the rest of them had been mourning. He began to see his father's pain, and the wound reopened only so the purulence could drain. A sob wrenched from his body. Thane caught him before he collapsed.

From what seemed like a great distance, Thane heard Captain Bailey coordinate transport to the precinct, where they could speak in private. For now, all that mattered was his son, head bent to his shoulder, wracked with a lifetime of pain — but a lifetime that was thankfully not yet over.

* * *

"Wow. Heavy stuff." Garrus was sucking down some dextro nutrient paste, listening to Shepard summarize the events of their trip to the Citadel today. They had gone up to Shepard's quarters after she complained that there was nowhere to sit in the forward battery.

"You don't have to eat — drink? — that gunk, you know," she said of the unappetizing tetra-pack he was guzzling. "We're docked at the Citadel. You could probably find something really delicious for a change."

Garrus shrugged. "To be honest, I kind of like it. It's good to keep things simple sometimes."

Shepard laughed. She was sitting on her bed cross-legged, while Garrus sat on the couch and put his feet up on her coffee table. They hadn't hung out like this in private before. It was starting to feel a little awkward, and she couldn't quite pinpoint why.

"Damn. Cerberus definitely gave you an upgrade. The rest of us are taking shifts on those crappy little bunkbeds." Garrus gestured around them at the large cabin, the exorbitant fish tank. Shepard had taken the fish tank very seriously, and picked up at least a few specimens from every commercial port they docked at. She claimed that it was a conservation effort in case of a Reaper invasion, and only seemed to be half-joking.

Shepard sighed. "Yeah, the accommodations are nice, but I wouldn't say that they gave _me_ an upgrade." She touched her fingers to her cheek where the ugly red scars had mostly healed. Her body was criss-crossed with faint lines that glowed in some kinds of light. "Alive, yes. Improved? Jury's out."

"Does your hair actually grow that colour now?" Garrus asked. He was teasing her. "I remember you used to re-dye it so diligently, you were almost as vain with it as a turian and his fringe."

Shepard winced. "You know, it actually does? It's completely weird." She pulled her hair free of her habitual chignon and fluffed it with her fingers. It fell about her face, wavy and wild, not going much past her shoulders.

"Oh. My bad." Garrus' voice had gone suddenly soft, and she became self-conscious under Garrus' gaze.

"Commander, I think I'm ready for my report," he said after a moment.

"Uh, what?"

"You wanted my opinion on Krios."

In fact, Shepard had never asked his opinion; but she had put him in that first squad together, and he had read between the lines. Not altogether inaccurately, either.

But why is he reporting now?

"Okay. Shoot," she said.

"In my… professional opinion, Krios is a damn fine shot with a sniper rifle, deadly as hell in hand-to-hand, knows how to follow orders, and puts off handling 'personal issues' until 'shore leave'." His emphatic air quotes made Shepard grin.

"But my formal recommendation is that you carefully consider whether or not he… can make you happy."

Shepard froze, her back stiffening like a pyjak caught in a krogan scope.

"Some of the personnel on this ship may be more qualified, based on a greater degree of experience from prior service, and who would be no less… passionate, about the job."

He took such heartbreaking care with his words.

"But that's just my formal recommendation. As your friend." The sadness was only visible in his eyes for a brief moment before he got up from the couch. "Anyway. The process I was waiting on is probably done. I've got to get back to my calibrations."

Shepard jumped up too, and followed him to the door. "Garrus, I–"

"It's okay, Shepard. Let's just get back to work. It'll all come out in the wash, as they say." He hit the elevator panel, and he was gone.

"How the fuck did this happen," Shepard muttered to herself, turning back to the lonesome quiet of her cabin.

* * *

"Sere Krios has returned to the _Normandy_," EDI's voice told Shepard, still in her cabin, sprawled on her bed and lost in thought.

She had requested notification from EDI because she had wanted to check in on him and see how things had gone with Kolyat. But now, she sat in the white noise of her cabin, contemplating Garrus and his… feelings?

There was no obvious lampshade to shoot in the three-way standoff she currently found herself in.

Spontaneously, she sprung to her feet again and headed down to Life Support.

As in all things: just carry on.

* * *

Shepard still hadn't figured out why an assassin would prefer to face away from the door at all times, but it didn't seem to matter because Thane always knew it was her when she came inside.

Today, his head was bent. He must have been exhausted. "Shepard."

"You okay?" she asked. She had the sudden urge to keep it casual. She pushed thoughts of Garrus out of her mind as she went to sit across from Thane.

"Yes. No. With Kolyat… it is difficult." He paused, lifted his eyes and smiled somewhat. "All things worth keeping are." He leaned back, straightening his posture. "Our problems… they aren't something I can fix with a few words. But we have agreed to keep talking. We'll see what happens."

"That's good news," Shepard said. "Something to fight for when we take on the Collectors. Keeps you focused." _God, this is beyond 'casual' and into 'trite marine-isms'._

"Focused?" Thane said, sighing and shifting his weight back in his chair. He looked at her with a strange expression: his eyes were so black that she couldn't distinguish his irises at all. "I don't know about that. There has been something I've found particularly… distracting lately."

Again? Shepard's improbable career was about to gain a statistic about romantic confessions per species per day. "Is that so."

"You were… phenomenal today," he said, the compliment rushing from him like a last breath. "You saved my son, and you saved me from myself. I could not have done it without you." Thane stood up, paced a few steps in the small room.

Shepard regarded him quietly. His gratitude was earnest, and also so fundamentally different from the kinds of thanks she tended to receive. More often than not, her achievements were met with awe, which made her uncomfortable. Worse still was the entitlement she sometimes encountered: 'well you're a war hero, this is what you're supposed to do.' But Thane was thanking her as one equal to another, one warrior appreciating another for their assistance.

Thane came to stand behind her, like a shadow come intensely to life. "You helped mend a broken part of me today. It makes me only more eager to do my part in your mission, so that I might somehow repay you."

"It was my pleasure," Shepard murmured, her head half-turned to him.

"Was it?" Shepard could hear the smile in Thane's voice. He bent, slowly leaning close to her ear. "You've freed your hair today," he said softly, his breath on her cheek, fluttering one crimson lock that tumbled by her face.

Shepard's eyes half-closed at his feather-light touch, her lips parted in an inaudible sigh.

And then the door opened.

It was Garrus.

"Oh– sorry. Awkward. Just coming in here to do some quick calibrations. On the life support system. Things."

Of course, Garrus' calibrations were never quick. Nor was his timing arbitrary. He was a shrewd son of a bitch.

Garrus and Thane shared a glance that communicated a great deal.

Shepard slid free and hopped out the door. "I'll… talk to you both later," she said, and headed for the elevator.

* * *

Mordin. Mordin's lab would be safe. Salarians scorn all things romantic.

"Hey, Mordin," she said with a great exhalation. "How are things?"

"Excellent. Nearing breakthrough on analysis of Collector corpse. Interesting genetic structure!"

Shepard couldn't say she was always in the mood to listen to Mordin's rapid-fire dissertations, but today it sounded like exactly the right thing. She leaned against what looked like a safe length of lab table and settled in for some epic "mm hmm"-ing.

"But, also, glad you came. Wanted to discuss something. Sexual activity, normal as stress release, but: recommend caution with Thane. Drell-human liaisons… complex. Thane, complex as well."

Shepard gaped. A startled laugh escaped her open mouth.

"Understand, touchy subject matter, but, is my duty to share medical information with commanding officer."

Shepard collected herself with a cursory glance to make sure both doors to the lab were closed. Successive surprises always have less of a sting, and she'd been through a few today. Besides, she was curious as hell. "Okay. Spill."

"Prolonged human to drell skin contact can cause small rash, itching. Oral contact may cause mild hallucinations."

Shepard almost laughed again at the absurdity of this conversation, but Mordin was dead serious. Also… she had questions. "Uh... oral contact... or _oral_ contact?" she asked.

Mordin looked at her placidly for a long moment, then replied, "Would have said oral-genital contact if was what I meant. Please, Commander. Verbal specificity, always good practice."

Shepard grinned. "Of course. Do go on." She was quietly a huge fan of the salarian, admiring his brilliant scientific mind and no-nonsense attitude. She took this for what it was: well-intentioned, looking-out for his friend and comrade.

Professor Mordin Solus, veteran of the STG genophage team, would know a thing or two about meddling in sexual success. Of her options, he seemed to put his chips on Thane.

And she should trust her science officer. Right?

"Have forwarded advice booklets to your terminal. Erogenous zones, positions comfortable for both species. Can supply oils or ointments to reduce discomfort, as well as salve to treat possible rash. Hope it helps."

"Aww, Mordin. That's the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me. You're the best, most unexpected, wingman ever." She clasped the salarian on the shoulder, her mouth wrestling with a smirk.

He modestly inclined his head. "Always happy to help."


	5. Chapter 5

When Shepard said, "Shore leave on Tuchanka," nobody jumped. Mordin and Garrus wisely kept to their stations; the sight of a salarian or a turian on Tuchanka would have been welcome for all the wrong reasons. Most people didn't want to get their asses kicked, and there was nothing safe to eat or drink down there for non-krogans anyway. For an initial consultation with someone at Urdnot about Grunt's condition, Shepard wasn't interested in starting any trouble — but backup would still be nice. If no one showed up at the shuttle bay she'd probably page–

Thane. He was already there, suited up and ready to depart.

She smiled at him. He smiled back and bent his head in a slight bow.

Grunt said, "Hurry it up, you don't want to see me try to pilot this thing."

They boarded and Shepard took the helm.

The ride down to the planet was a bitch. Powerful winds buffeted at the shuttle, but Shepard tweaked some settings to compensate and the shuttle cabin ceased its jostling. Plunging down what seemed like an enormous pipe, the shuttle touched down in Urdnot Camp.

They occupied apparently the sole landing pad. "I guess they don't get too many visitors," she quipped, and popped the hatch.

The motley group looked tough enough that crushing them would be a hassle, but not so tough to be a tempting threat to engage. At least, that was what Shepard was banking on. A few shady looking krogan watched as they descended from the landing pad, but only one small delegation approached them.

"The clan leader is expecting you." One of them grudgingly threw his thumb over his shoulder to point roughly down a hall.

"Thanks," Shepard said, and he glared at her.

Tuchanka was a shithole: the stuff of postmodern apocalyptic fiction, all broken-down infrastructure and people living in camps carved out of the ground. Shepard used to enjoy reading that old literature, before knowledge of the Reapers made it too real to stomach. Emerging from the hallway into an open space, Grunt muttered, "This is my homeworld? It's barely fit to stand on. I never thought I would miss the tank."

Shepard clucked her tongue and gave him a consoling pat on the shoulder, which made him rumble with adolescent resentment.

Then, a red-armoured krogan pushed his way past a line of guards. "Shepard!"

Thane took a step closer to her — he must have read the stiffening in her spine as she braced herself — but the lumbering mass was moving in to clasp her arm, not crush her.

"Shepard, my friend. You look well for dead. Should have known the void couldn't hold you."

Shepard's mouth worked for a moment before blurting out, "Wrex…!"

"Welcome to Urdnot. Watch your step. Wouldn't want you to twist an ankle."

He climbed back up the rise of rubble to where a set of enormous pieces of concrete had been repurposed into a crude, yet unmistakable throne.

"You've done well for yourself," Shepard said, following him apace.

"Not for me, Shepard. For all krogan. Clan Urdnot is just the start. When I'm done, we will be one people again. But what brings you here? How's the _Normandy_?"

"Blown up in a surprise attack by a Collector ship. I ended up spaced." Shepard kept things curt, as befitting conversation with a krogan. Or so she hoped.

"Well, you look good. Must have been painful; but you're standing here, and you've got a strong new ship. Takes me back to the old days: us against the unknown, killing it with big guns… good times."

"I have a krogan on my crew," Shepard began, smoothly cutting off any opportunity for reminiscing. "He's having some anger management issues that even he finds unnatural. What's wrong with him?"

She felt Thane's eyes on her. He knows. But she kept facing Wrex, maintained a neutral expression.

Wrex leaned forward in his seat, and Grunt approached him.

Shepard took pride in Grunt's composure as he addressed Wrex on his Tuchanka throne — perhaps unduly, since she didn't really deserve credit for it. When Wrex asked him if he wished to stand with Urdnot, she was strangely pleased with the profound simplicity in his assent:

"It is in my blood. It is what I am for."

"Good boy," said Wrex. "Speak with the shaman. Give him a good show and he'll set you on the path."

Shepard nodded briskly. "We'll talk later." She took her squad in the direction Wrex gestured.

Thane walked close, by her elbow. "You didn't recognize him." The subharmonics of his murmur were only for Shepard.

She shook her head once, rough, almost like a twitch.

"Yet you knew his name."

She looked at him. His eyes were searching her expression. "It came eventually. Thane… I know a lot of things, but… I lost a lot more than Miranda's project reports would have anyone believe." She swallowed hard. "We can talk about this later. Let's focus on whatever this Rite is. I somehow doubt it's going to involve Bible readings and an open bar."

She left Thane puzzling over the reference as she bounded up the steps to the shaman's overlook.

* * *

Thane saw the grim set in Shepard's mouth before she swung her helmet on to brace against the harsh and radioactive Tuchanka winds. They would be stepping out of the truck soon to discover exactly what a krogan 'proving ground' entailed. Thane well knew a ritual designed to challenge a krogan stood a good chance of simply rolling over the average human or drell supplicant. He prayed that he and Shepard would prove suitably exceptional.

The shaman left them on a large, open-air dais punctuated by flimsy freestanding columns of loose metal that rattled in the wind. An enormous structure overshadowed them from the east: a huge tower that could only date to the ancient days when krogan were unified enough to undertake such a construction project. The tower was mechanical in nature, with evidently no interior. It was a superstructure to support a simple counterweight system.

"A maw hammer." Grunt's eyes glittered in recognition. "I was shown that in the tank. I know what it's named, but I don't know what it does."

It seemed that Shepard had a good enough guess of what they could be facing. Before leaving Urdnot Camp, Shepard had gone back to the shuttle to switch gear for the Rite, sight unseen. She returned with her custom N7 breather helmet and a heavy weapon. Thane did not see fit to question her decisions at the time, but realized now how justified her brief delay had been. He prayed the extra durability and firepower would be enough.

"Hit the keystone, Shepard. Let's get this started," Grunt entreated her, but she would have none of it. Thane tracked the ancient cabling running from the large green button, back and back to the base of the maw hammer. No, Shepard would take her time triggering that, and he agreed with her wisdom.

The Commander scouted the area, rapping on structures to test their texture and durability. She hopped down ledges to explore. She knelt at krogan corpses, the flesh desiccated and torn away by the harsh environment, impossible to date. She gathered what knowledge she could from their wounds, and fished resources from their pockets.

"Hit the keystone," Grunt repeated, impatient. Thane raised a warning hand to him.

Shepard scanned the skies, assessed the roiling clouds. She adjusted her optics to stare down a long channel at one corner of the dais.

Finally, she ambled back to the pair.

"That thing is going to summon the local fauna which gives this planet its lovely reputation," she said in the cool tone more native to the briefing room than to this howling windscape. "Conserve your clips, since we don't know how long we'll be here. They'll probably advance quickly, so keep an eye on your six and don't get overwhelmed." She was speaking mostly to Thane now. "For you and me, it'll be about keeping them off of us and killing them at range. You know how." He saw the smile in the corners of her eyes through the small window of her breather mask. He let his fist flicker blue in acknowledgment.

"Grunt," she said, clapping a hand on his broad shoulder. "Have a good time." With her other hand, she punched the green button.

The enormous ancient hammer fell, a massive weight sliding down the interior of the tower structure to ring against the ground, issuing a pulse that felt like it originated inside Thane's skull. Shaking it off, he unholstered his sniper rifle and scanned the perimeter through the scope. Their backs against the gate to the maw hammer complex, they could be approached on three sides by the enemy.

"Varren," he said with relief. "Two o'clock. In numbers." He hardly finished the phrase before firing off three quick shots into three varren skulls.

"Good. Starting us off easy." Shepard deployed a combat drone into the midst of the pack.

"I AM KROGAN!" bellowed Grunt, and tore off. The barrel of his shotgun crunched the vertebrae of the varren vanguard.

Mindful of the advice to conserve ammo, Thane employed his rifle's scope largely to improve the precision of his biotic attacks, enveloping a centrally-placed varren in dark energy before detonating it with a second sphere of light arcing from his palm. The resultant biotic explosion would send its neighbours scattered and hurt, slowing their advance. Shepard turned to face a second group, which approached from the south. Her SMG fired in neat pulses, obeying a rhythm of efficient execution. After the first varren shrugged off a plasma fireball, she switched tactics, painting them with cryo blasts and shattering them with the impact of a handful of SMG slugs. It was slow, however, and the varren were scrambling to her with the speed of starving beasts. One got too close, and she had to fire straight down to target the beast in the brain. She was beginning to give up ground, backing slowly to the north, to keep her knees out of the reach of the snap of varren teeth.

Thane holstered his rifle and palmed his SMG instead. With one hand free, he threw biotic energy in the direction of the nearest varren, bouncing them off the far wall and leaving them dazed for Shepard's execution. There. He'd bought her a few more metres.

Turning back to the original onslaught, Thane found Grunt wrestling one down, allowing a pack to break away and bear down on his position. He was able to take down two or three before finding himself attacked on three sides. A biotic throw battered one out of the way, but a second one had come close enough for him to hear the crack of its slavering jaw.

Then it suddenly jerked away. Shepard had grabbed it by the tail and swung it hard against a nameless metallic structure, firing three rapid shots into its eye after it bounced. The display of strength was incongruous with her slight frame: a combination of Cerberus upgrades and the servos of her armour, Thane guessed. Thane finished off the third varren with a swift kick to dislodge its jaw, and a biotically-enhanced fist to the brain. As one, he and Shepard braced against the rickety column, their eyes meeting. _This is getting too close._

Her gaze went to the middle distance; she seemed to be listening. The howl and bark of the varren were closing on them. She picked her moment from some inscrutable knowledge, and swung out from cover to drop a combat drone above the very centre of the pack of varren, precisely as they grouped together to pass through the choke point between the hammer gate and a nearby column. The drone detonated, blasting them into the ground with enough velocity to crack their spines.

For nearly an hour, they fought off waves of the beasts, who must have been summoned from vast territories around the ritual grounds. Shepard cycled through a variety of attacks on each pack as they approached, each successive time refining the technique in ways that only a trained eye — and eidetic memory — could recognize. As a result, the lengths of the battles were inversely proportional to their level of exhaustion, leaving them worn but energized by the end.

Thane raised his eyes to his scope. "Looks like there are no more coming for now."

Shepard took stock. "Is any of that yours?" she asked of the apron of blood smearing Grunt's armour.

"Hah! Dog bites don't scare me," came his answer, which was apparently good enough for Shepard.

She looked Thane up and down, and nodded her head to him. He nodded back. It pleased him to share this wordless rapport.

"We're fine. Hit the keystone again! I'm ready for round two." Grunt's exuberance was rumbly and bloodied: he was truly the pinnacle of krogan youth.

Shepard shrugged smoothly and punched the button a second time. "Let's find out what's up next."

Thane felt the pinch of fluid in his lungs, but Shepard's endurance was unflagging. He was determined to keep pace.

The maw hammer rose and fell a second time, the waves of sound striving to stagger the sure-footed squad.

Unholy shrieking came rolling over the broken gates of the Tuchanka landscape.

"Klixen!" Thane heard in Grunt's cry the enthusiasm of an encounter with something of myth. He thought of young Kolyat, spying a fish he'd known only from edu-vids.

Shepard and Thane exchanged a glance. The name Grunt shouted meant nothing to either of them. She nodded to him again, with the eyes she had when she would issue a "stay sharp!" to any other squad. It warmed him that she felt no need to give him that warning.

The klixen were enormous invertebrate creatures cased in an exoskeleton, like villainous overblown crustaceans. They might have seemed at home on the murky seabeds of Kahje's most sinister trenches. They rolled towards them on tiny clicking claws, slower than the varren, but inexorable.

Grunt charged towards the nearest one, smashing it with his shotgun butt. The klixen flesh exposed underneath the shattered exoskeleton burst into vicious flame, eliciting a howl of pain and thrill from the krogan as the hide of his face was scorched.

"Fucking masochistic maniacs, these krogan," Shepard said with a note of fondness. "Let's not get too close. My complexion won't like it."

On two sides, queues of klixen encroached upon the pair. Shepard experimented with a plasma fireball: it singed the chitinous shell of one klixen, blackening its texture, although it did not slow its advance. Thane seized the opportunity and fired neat slashes of bullet holes with his SMG. Shepard's incendiary attack had rendered the carapace more friable, and it sloughed off with his precision gunfire. Shepard's own SMG rang out with the death blow to the beast's undefended flesh, and it collapsed into a smouldering heap. This method was effective, but the onslaught of varren had already put too much of a dent in their stockpile of thermal clips. It was not a sustainable strategy.

"You do those biotic combos, Thane," Shepard said to him as she moved past his shoulder. "It's far more efficient at range. I have my own idea."

With an eye to her, Thane resumed his previous strategy with the varren, exploding the approaching klixen with a steady sequence of matter destabilizing attacks and flanking gravitational throws. Their bodies flew into one another in an inferno of blue biotics and red flame. Peripherally, Thane saw Shepard examine one of the flimsy columns made of poles and flapping metal sheets. She knelt, watchful of enemies on her perimeter, and flipped a tiny torch from her omnitool, burning through the base of one of the poles and neatly severing it. She wrenched it free and weighed it in her palms, taking a step back, put off-balance by its unwieldy length. Angling it on the structure it came from, she sheared off the bottom third with the same miniature torch, and kicked aside the extra length of pole. She braced what remained in her hands.

Thane saw her intent, and felt a smile on his lips. This _siha_ never ceased to surprise him.

Outstretching an arm like Amonkira, she issued another flaming arc from her omnitool, turning the nearest klixen's carapace into charcoal. Then, the pole came swinging around, smashing the klixen to one side and knocking it over, its exoskeleton shattering. The flames from its uncovered flesh licked harmlessly along the metal alloy. Not wasting the momentum, Shepard orbited the pole around her again, this time raising it above her to come crashing down in an execution blow of the klixen, who burst into sullen flames a polearm's distance away. She whirled to face her next opponent.

Her powerful longform technique lacked the grace of those trained in any one particular ancient martial art, but the flick and smash of the pole was efficient enough, and dispatched the beasts consistently. She hardly flagged as wave upon wave of scuttling monsters broke upon them.

"Is that it?" she asked, with some shortness of breath, when the klixen finally stopped rounding the tops of the dais steps. "I could do that all day."

"Thankfully you won't have to, Shepard." Truthfully, Thane felt guilty for his biotics at that moment — although they had spared his worsening lungs from further exertion.

"It always feels wrong to shoot an unarmed opponent." Shepard tossed her blackened staff to join the rest of the smoking wreckage. She stretched her arms. "Good warm-up, Grunt," she called to the krogan, who was glowing with delight under a layer of soot. "These things usually come in threes, isn't that right?"

It was a favoured cross-cultural joke among spacers that things usually did.

"Hit the keystone," Shepard said in perfect time with Grunt. She strode back to it and thumbed it once again.

The oscillating tones of the maw hammer's impact were a sense-memory Thane would not be returning to. It occurred to him that the staggering lower frequencies were probably lost on non-drell ears. He was still tilting his head in an effort to recover when he heard Grunt shout a single feverish syllable, and detected Shepard's cry to take cover.

There was not much cover to be had, so he found himself crouched beside Shepard in a nook carved out of the scarred stone of the maw hammer's lower structures.

He followed the angle of Shepard's narrowed gaze to see that the harmonics of the hammer drop had been more excruciating this time because the device had successfully summoned its namesake.

An enormous florid head wobbled atop a many-segmented body, like a nightmare of millipedes scaled up far, far too much. It reared up out of the sand, and Thane dreaded to think how much more of its demonic body was still buried.

"That's why I wanted to conserve ammo," Shepard muttered to herself. It was not horror in her eyes, or even surprise; just brief displeasure. Grunt ambled over to join them, after he was finished shaking his shotgun aloft and shouting joyous battle cries.

"What's the plan?" The krogan recognized her superiority even though this was allegedly his own test.

"Stay fanned out, take multiple angles of attack. It's big but it's still outnumbered." She looked between them with a steady, clear-eyed gaze. "Thane, you have agility and a big gun. Keep its attention. Grunt, you and I fire from angles. Let's try to decapitate this fucker."

Grunt pounded his fists together in acknowledgment.

Thane pondered his mortality. It was not the death he had planned for at the top of Dantius Towers, but it was an acceptable exchange for the experiences of fighting at Shepard's side for these past weeks.

_Amonkira, grant that my feet be swift and my aim true. May I draw fire and never take it. _

He pushed out from cover and faced the nightmarish beast.

His rifle's scope would be of negligible aid when he was dashing across the battlefield. With a target this large, he could fire from arm's length. The slugs may not do as much damage as a precision shot, but his custom shredder ammo stood a good chance of causing it pain. He stood in the centre of the dais, lifted his gun, and fired.

The maw howled, and Thane's keen eyes saw blood spurt from the centre of its pointed blue tongue. A perfect shot.

"You're supposed to be bait, not the tip of the blade," Grunt growled at him from his position further down the field. It was a grudging compliment.

Shepard shouted for Grunt's attention and gave the signal to load armour-piercing ammunition.

She was firing her SMG, but only, it would seem, to kill time between reloading her plasma attacks. The superheated flames were crinkling the maw's carapace much like the klixen's, and she sent combat drones to attack the spots weakened by incineration. She was focusing on a point just behind the maw's face, if it could be called that. Shepard seemed to be serious about the threat of decapitation.

Grunt focused his assault rifle fire on a symmetrical point on the other side, punching a smoking hole in the maw's chitinous shell.

Thane fired three successive shots into the maw's mouth, and he certainly had its attention. It screamed one last time, before a massive glob of fluid gathered in its mouth to be fired as a projectile towards its drell attacker.

Thane nimbly cartwheeled away on one arm, the sniper rifle tucked under the other.

He noted the brief lapse in SMG fire as Shepard watched for his safety.

Lifting his gun again, he fired another precise shot into the soft tissues of the maw's face.

It howled, lifted its blind gaze upwards, and shimmied back into the sand.

"Coward!" howled Grunt.

"Preserve your calm, Grunt," Shepard said with a touch of irony. "That doesn't feel like a retreat."

True enough, the ground rumbled as the maw swam through the dry Tuchanka earth. It was a hideous recombination of the drell homeworlds, old and new, to have an ocean of sand where giant beasts glide in three-space. The vibrations seemed to be coming from everywhere.

The maw crested again from behind the group, howling, and spat another acidic attack in Thane's direction.

He was less prepared this time, and dove towards cover which crumbled apart on the impact of venom. He leapt backwards to evade splatter, but another volley was already airborne toward him.

He heard Shepard's wordless cry of command, two crisp shouts — to whom? Saying what? There was little he could do from his position but tuck and roll, and hope he could get far enough away to avoid being melted. But a flash of orange before his eyes revealed the quick-as-thought deployment of a combat drone formed into a broad omni-shield on one side. Pellets of flash-frozen maw venom, hit with a cryo blast, shattered off the drone's shield and bounced to the ground. The drone fizzled out of existence, reappearing at its position by the thresher maw's head to continue firing at the singed and brittle chitin.

Thane brushed off the near-miss, and sprinted to more secure cover. The maw turned its rage toward Grunt. The krogan's chosen cover fared considerably better, but he was still shaking off splashes of acid eating slowly through his armour.

Shepard backed toward Thane's position, unhooking her particle beam from its holster on her back.

"You okay?" she asked him while sighting down the rifle's scope.

"Unharmed," he replied. She fired.

She also targeted the soft flesh of the maw's face, tracing the tongue and the interior of the horrific mouth. Her aim was excellent, but impatient; she did not wait to line up a perfect shot, but allowed the beam to catch up to its destination, pulling the trigger a split second early. It was the kind of imperfection, Thane realized, that would probably go unnoticed by most others.

She took a few bold steps forward, drawing up the angle of attack to punch through the back of the maw's throat, then abruptly shut off the beam. She rolled into cover opposite Thane.

He watched her curiously, then heard the mixed howls of the maw's death knells and Grunt's triumphant bellows. His assault rifle had landed the final killing blows.

Commander Shepard in action was a spectacle of balancing fierceness with restraint, balancing war with wisdom. Thane may be the best in the galaxy at bringing down a single organic target, but Shepard saw beyond the individual deaths laid out before her. She perceived the mission. By sheer force of will and the tactical application of genius, she moulded the mission into success: no, an _elegant_ success. And as much as she was deadly on her own, she was an artist when in command.

Thane had often conceived of himself as a gun, paid by his employers to fire without opinion. But when he was wielded by Shepard, his soul sang.

Shepard smiled at Thane, and that was how he realized he had been smiling at her.


	6. Chapter 6

"Ha ha ha! I did it! I did it! You should have seen it! I did it! I felled a thresher maw!" Grunt's rejoicing involved such loud and broad gesticulations that it quickly became hazardous to the crew, who were trying to scrub down the shuttle after it had docked in the Normandy shuttle bay.

Following the death of the thresher maw, a brief altercation with Clan Gatatog was tidied and quickly forgotten. Shepard led the squad to leave immediately for the Normandy. Suffice it that the shaman knew that Grunt had passed his Rite. Shepard wanted back on her ship without a follow up conversation with Wrex.

Grunt cornered a terrified shuttle tech and was about to launch into a detailed account of every wave of enemies they'd faced, so Shepard and Thane got into the elevator alone. She punched the button to her loft, sighed, and leaned against the wall.

Thane didn't touch the panel. He quietly regarded her, instead — apparently following her to her bedroom.

"A little presumptuous, aren't we?" She chided him only halfheartedly.

"You said we would talk," he evenly reminded her.

Shepard pulled her helmet off and rubbed her forehead. "Alright." She stepped out of the open elevator, unlocking the door to her cabin with a wave of her omnitool.

The place was a mess. She hadn't been expecting visitors. Components were scattered across her desk, various electrical bits mixed with prestigious medals, a bag of hamster food left out in one corner. Pads of paper, that unhackable retro tech standby, were scrawled with handwritten notes, the letters firmly upright and quirkily joined together. A note in a different hand — much more loops — was stuck to the fish tank. It read: "Fed your fish again", and then "x 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6" as Kelly Chambers counted the days when she would come in and do this small part of Shepard's housekeeping.

Shepard made an irritated sound in her throat when she realized that Thane was seeing her secret shame. The clouds quickly passed as she crossed the room in long strides, unbuckling her armour as she went. Sitting on the edge of her bed, she freed herself of each piece and roughly re-assembled them in her armour locker.

Soon she was in front of Thane in that Cerberus bodysuit again, only this time without a scrap of plating to obscure her.

She wasn't nearly as jiggly as Miranda in the same getup. Shepard's body was compact and taut. Her musculature was smooth and curvilinear, skimming underneath her skin like dolphins at play. Her athleticism was the kind built for obstacle courses.

The synth-weave of the bodysuit covered skin but not much else. One thing it definitely did not cover was her body's read on the room temperature. It was always cold in the loft. Damned pointless skylight.

She folded her arms across her chest.

Thane shrugged smoothly out of his jacket and proffered it to her. Whether it was for her warmth or her modesty, she could not tell — but she accepted it without thinking, motivated perhaps by a greedy desire for closeness to him.

She flipped the jacket around her shoulders. It was only a little warm; certainly not as warm as a jacket would be after a human had worn it, but the temperature was comforting in the way fresh bedsheets are. There was the faintest spicy scent that made her imagine clumps of cinnamon wafting like sakura petals on an alien desert planet.

"Thank you–"

_Oh_.

Thane's shirt underneath, the one that bared a rectangle of his upper chest, which he claimed was for health reasons _but, you know, damn–_

It was sleeveless. It was really more like a buckled combat vest. There were his broad and rounded shoulder muscles, and the biceps that were usually kept unpretentiously tucked away in swaths of dark cloth. Arms which easily hoisted the heaviest sniper rifles, which supported improbable acrobatics, which contained both the strength and technique to neck-snap a krogan: naturally, they were big, firm, packed with undulating muscle and cord, powerful without a hint of wasteful bulk. He had the arms of a contract killer — well, of course he did, he _was_ one — but the patient gaze of a monk.

Shepard observed that drell arms were not anatomically all that different from human arms, apart from the black markings that swirled like tattoos across textured green skin.

She pulled the jacket close around her body, and tamped down the appreciative sigh that she felt trying to escape her lungs.

"Tell me of your memory loss." Thane's voice was velvet, soft and intimate, sensitive to the personal environs and her potential difficulty with the subject matter. Of course he hadn't forgotten that moment at Urdnot Camp, even through the adrenaline of the Rite. It was foolish of her to hope that he would. Drell never forget — and Shepard… did.

He moved to the couch, seating himself at a modest distance from her. He rested his elbows on his knees, his fingers steepled together, dark eyes regarding her with a gentle but fixed attention. Shepard briefly resented the way he slammed on both sides of her nice guy/bad boy inclinations, composing his killer body into such courteous dignity. Not fair.

She pulled up her feet to sit cross-legged on the edge of the bed. The black, spice-scented jacket enveloped her in an aromatic cocoon. She exhaled, hard, with a soft thrum of consternation, drawing her attention back to his inquiry. It was a secret she had been keeping from her crew for months. How would she even explain it?

"Loss isn't the right word." She explored how to phrase the sensation, each syllable coming low and tentative. "It's like I was reborn without any way to be sure that those things had really happened."

Thane sat, silent. His dark eyes were two portholes into deep space: the calm of the void, spirited with vast, untouchable life. The epistemological problem of other minds was writ large when gazing out a starship window, but it came full circle in the way he was looking at her.

"I feel like a VI that has gained awareness. I know a lot of things about my life, but that knowledge… it wasn't packaged with the things that make memory _real_. The embodied experience of it. I'm not sure how to explain… "

She could tell Thane immediately understood. He somehow traversed the inestimable distances between minds with the breadth of his sympathy. His brow-ridges were drawn together in an expression of profound pity.

Shepard was unaccustomed to pity. Not since Mindoir. Not since joining the Alliance and learning to be strong. Or, at least, that was the story. Though she could have been indignant at his reaction, instead she felt a strange relief, like an airlock depressurizing at port. Thane saw past her hero's reputation and multiple military ranks, and saw her as a human. No, even less alien than that — he saw her as a woman. Thane, the noble assassin, stood outside stereotype, and his presence granted her permission to unfold from the imagery of the dauntless marine.

"It seems like I know things about myself the way I know how FTL drives work," she resumed, steadily. "I know it in theory, but it's not observable, you know?"

Thane chuckled softly at the apt simile. He rose to contemplate the fish tank, his hands folded behind him, his silhouette outlined by shimmering aquatic light.

"My religion would have an explanation for you, Shepard." His voice bounced off the glass of the tank, crystallizing its many resonances.

"Really." She would have let him talk about anything, at that moment.

"We believe in a soul separate from the body. My understanding is that many humans share that belief; ours is just a bit more… literal. A priest of our old religion might say that when you died on the first _Normandy_, your soul departed your body. When you were brought back, a new one came to inhabit you. Although your body retains its experiences as imprints in the brain, the phenomenological experiences, the… qualia of life, belong to the soul. So perhaps, in a way, you were born anew on that laboratory slab."

Shepard stood, suddenly restless. "So I'm a Cerberus super-husk lugging around an underdeveloped soul meant for an infant." The thought tasted bitter as she spoke it.

"Quite the opposite." Thane turned to look at her. "I believe the soul you have is an extraordinary one. I believe you are a _siha_."

He spoke so frankly, Shepard almost dared not ask what he meant. But she did, and his answer was open, without pretense. "A _siha_. A warrior-angel of the goddess Arashu. Fierce in wrath, a tenacious protector."

Shepard, the consummate atheist, might have been tempted to laugh, or to judge — but there was something deeply personal in this metaphysical talk, a sentiment carried within it that had nothing to do with antiquated mythologies.

"I knew another siha, once." He turned back to the fish tank and the sleepy, slow motion flutter of its inhabitants. "My wife. I first saw her through my rifle's scope, when she noticed my laser sight and threw herself in the way of my target, a stranger to her. She met my eyes through the scope, and my purpose faltered. I could not pull the trigger, that day." She could see his face reflected in the glass. His dark eyes were woeful, but they had not gained that flickering, inward quality when he was lost inside a memory. He was staying with her, with Shepard, for now. It surprised her how much she wanted that.

"During the Dantius commission, feeling you pushing me to reach the target, forcing me to move faster, challenging me — I suspected I had met another siha. Few are privileged to meet even one."

Shepard watched pale blue light glance off of the burnished smooth scales of his face, his black eyes like inky sapphire baubles. She imagined the way his wife must have seen him, living in a marine biodome of Kahje, submersed in this kind of light all the time.

Shepard decided to unfurl these metaphors in her usual style.

"Is 'siha' just your euphemism for incredible women you've fallen for?" she asked with a crooked smile, leaning against the fish tank to captivate his view.

His expression underwent many transformations: surprise at first, and finally a smile after processing an exquisite ache. "Perhaps, Shepard," he said, as he finally landed upon something gently resolute. "I confess, I have come to care for you. Perhaps I'm being foolish. We are very different."

"Not so different," Shepard murmured, and with the decisiveness that had propelled her up the Alliance ranks, she leaned forward and pressed her mouth to the full bottom lip of the first drell she had ever met.

She had wanted him for so long, but in this moment, one reason for it became suddenly clear. _The qualia of life_, he had said: it was exactly the promise of _feeling_ things that had made him so irresistible. Thane was so deeply present in his physicality, and yet contained vast stores of equally embodied moments in a memory bank she yearned to access, which wildly outmatched the uncertain phantasms of her own past. And in every present moment, being around him was exquisitely multisensory, a perfect counterbalance to her world lived in cerebral calculations floating in impalpable data streams. Her vision drank in the impossibly black pools of his eyes, the fullness of his lips, the graceful precision of his posture. Her hearing thrilled with the multilayered vibrations of his resonance and the careful intention of his words. And now, the scent of him in his jacket: it was so distant and lovely and impossible to place. No wonder she was overwhelmed with the sudden need to discover the taste of his lips. She wanted to feel everything, and she wanted to feel everything about him. She wanted to lose herself in the sensory experience of Thane.

His soft moan of surprise at the contact of their lips, electrified her. She tilted her head and kissed him again, hard, her tongue emerging to taste him. She felt his hands slide around her waist underneath the jacket, encircling her in the firm bulk of his arms. His lips were smoother than they looked, deceptive like the baby-soft surprise of snakeskin. The taste of him tingled on her tongue like asari sugar candy. The jacket fell away to the cabin floor.

She felt the cool, textured touch of a drell hand along the nape of her neck, the thumb gently stroking along the soft slope of her vertebrae. Those hands could just as easily twist and end her life, as they had done to an unknown number of other victims. Living amongst elite soldiers meant every gesture, every moment of proximity to another person was an encounter with death. Everyone was a finely tuned killing machine. Thane was perhaps the most corporeal killing machine she'd ever met, hardly dependent on accessories like guns or tech or flashy biotics, as much as he freely used all three. The galaxy's deadliest assassin had his hand poised on her neck; alarms thrilled through the primitive part of her mind occupied solely with self-preservation. But his touch was so tender, and so achingly welcome. Her heart raced towards the sensation that her basest instincts cried out to flee. The conflict in her body made her extremities tingle. This was phenomenological in a way that promised to compensate for all her lost years.

Their kisses grew fierce, trading moans in one another's open mouths. Her hands instinctively rose to clutch at the backs of his shoulders, the nape of his neck. When her fingers tickled along the base of his crest, the contact drew an impassioned rumble from his throat. She couldn't press her body to him hard enough. The buckles across his chest dug into her with a painful thrill.

Her arms around his neck, she kicked up her feet to wrap her legs around his waist. He accepted her weight without missing a beat.

* * *

It had not been Thane's intention to seduce Shepard in this conversation, and he knew little of human courtship practices. When it happened, it was like meeting her in the field: coming faster and more fiercely than he could have anticipated. She was so soft, her lips buttery and perversely wet. He pulled her into him, his body entirely awakened by the sensation of her pressing so tightly. The rush of endorphins and the profound sense of _rightness_ cascading in his brain affirmed his sexuality cared not for their difference in species.

They kissed and kissed and kissed, a succession of passionate snapshots for his mind's eye. Thane committed to memory every whimper and coo that purred in the curve of her throat. He brought her to the bed and laid her atop it, and they kissed away every doubt and every aching hour of tension and every threshold of battle. Her fingers tried to twine in his and the pads of her delicate fingertips caught on his sensitive webbing, his palms coursing with thrills. He reached to grasp her at the ribcage and felt her breasts compress together, soft and lasciviously fleshy. Her skin was so creamy, her lips so moist: all of Shepard's exquisite mammalian textures were as the _inside_ of a drell woman. It was almost unbearably erotic.

Suddenly her lips parted from his long enough to ask, "Do you really?" in a warm and humid exhalation.

He couldn't place what she might be asking. He pulled back to feast his inquisitive eyes on her. Her own dark eyes fluttered open.

They were too dark.

Even with those brown-black irises, he could tell that her pupils were dilated enough to nearly swallow them up.

She squinted away from the dim yellow lamplight, and he knew he was right. He held her head gently with one steady hand, tangling his fingertips in her tousled crimson hair.

"Do I really what, siha?"

Her brows knit together briefly before she was seemingly distracted by something out of the corner of her eye — though nothing was there that Thane could tell.

"I… thought you said something."

"How could I, siha? My mouth was very occupied." He couldn't help but smile. His thumbs grazed her jawline, and he leaned forward, aching to press his lips to hers again.

"Of course," she murmured.

* * *

Shepard was seeing spots, or were they crosshairs? Unattended drones flitting to and fro in her peripheral vision? They were innocuous everyday things, the kinds of hallucinations she'd get after being awake for too many days in the field, and then suddenly it was more. Her whole body, every nerve ending tingled, the way she imagined biotics must feel — except her energy was gathering in the hard buds of her nipples and blindingly hot between her thighs. She had no idea how to direct this energy, what form it would take if she was meant to gather it and fire it at an opponent.

There was no opponent, unless the sport was lovemaking. Then there would be only Thane.

She had barely glanced over those pamphlets on human-drell contact that Mordin had sent her. It was mostly the statistics that interested her. What proportion of cases showed symptoms at all? Was Mordin just playing the overly cautious doctor? The science seemed sound, and she figured her Cerberus 'upgrades' stood a good chance of placing her within the percentile that showed no reaction. The documentation had gone into a folder titled "Low Priority". She nearly gave it a new folder, labeled "wishful thinking", since she hardly thought it would even get the chance to become an issue.

Wishful thinking, indeed. Under the influence of drell hallucinogens, her mind saw fit to invent words in the elegant resonance of Thane's voice: _I love you, Shepard._

"There's something you should know, Thane." She angled her face away to speak. He pressed his cheek to hers, suckled at her earlobe. Her eyes fluttered. A lesser woman's train of thought might have melted.

_There's something you should know, Thane. I think you're sexy as all hell. I think about you too much. I think about your quiet, confident presence. I think about your big guns. I think about the poetry, the sureness of you. I think about your feelings about me. I think I'm falling in love with you._

"I think I'm starting to hallucinate as a reaction to your salivary chemistry," was what she said.

A long, quizzical pause from him, as she held her breath. "Are you alright?" The resonance of his voice washed over her ears in waves that made her vision tingle.

"Yes, I'm fine. It's a known interspecies physiology thing for drell and humans. It's not harmful. It's just a… mild… phenomenon."

Thane pulled back, his gaze roving over her body, almost as though he were checking for wounds, abnormalities. His hands brushed along her collarbone, caressed her biceps. "Tell me, how does it feel?"

It felt like the buildup of energy in a ship's hull before being fired out by a mass relay. It felt like a pistol with a jammed thermal clip, just heating and heating to bursting. It felt like being slammed with a warp field that electrified every nerve ending until it was ultra-sensitive. Her eyes and her ears may have been making up new stimuli, but her skin seemed instead to be discovering every nuance of what it meant to authentically _feel_. It was the very brink of an explosion.

Her body craved the sensation of Thane Krios executing his athletic precision deep inside of her.

All this arose as she tried to answer his question, and so she could only shudder and say, "Really, really good."

"Then… should we stop?"

It was a necessary question, and a courteous one, characteristic of his unfalteringly respectful manner.

The answer came from Shepard's body, a desperate flare of opposition. She was psychologically brought to her knees by it. Her hips angled forward, pressing against him in an autonomic bid to _mate_.

"No, please. I need you, Thane." Her words were more air than voice. She felt her breath coming quickly, her heart pulsing like an overtaxed drive core. As the dim cabin light flickered in her vision, she felt herself losing control: bodily control which was ingrained, hard-fought, a constant survival companion. As it slipped away, she pressed her cheek against the cool texture of Thane's chest, and closed her eyes. Visions of floating drones and arcing incendiary rounds continued to flit in the middle distance of sensory darkness, but Thane's body was steady, stable, and very present.

When she opened her eyes again, he was tenderly loosening her hair from its high chignon, a soft rumble in his throat.

"This is… so beautiful." He held a curling lock aloft in his palm, watched the texture splay between his thumb and forefinger. In return, Shepard traced her fingers along his mohawk of bumpy crests. He blinked slowly, his back stiffening somewhat with a sensitive response. The crests were warm, warmer than his jacket was. Vestigial heat-sinks from a desert world, like her vestigial fur from a savannah planet: remnants of lost environments, meeting in space and affirming the universality of… something.

With the backs of two fingers, she stroked the ruddy accordion texture of his under-throat. He laughed a short "ha!" — he was ticklish. He twined his fingers in her hair and pressed her head to his chest, her ear to his throat, which had inflated slightly. He began to murmur in a low rumble that she felt more than heard, just beneath the auditory range of her species. It was a powerful vibration that transmitted warmth through her entire body. Her brain, already overwhelmed by foreign chemicals, responded with a synaesthetic vision of blue and orange waves rollicking across her mindscape.

"…Ah…!" she heard herself say, the sound coaxed forth involuntarily by the sensory overload.

"You could hear that?" There was a smile in Thane's surprise.

"More like… feel it." She pulled back to look at him. "What was it?"

"A prayer," he said in a soft sigh. "Of thanks."

"Don't thank your gods yet." Shepard found her voice had gained a low, throaty rasp. His vibrations had rolled through her, and lingered in certain highly sensitized regions. "We haven't even gotten started."

Her free hand was pulling down the zip of her bodysuit, baring a widening delta of pale flesh. He straightened to gaze down at her from where he straddled her at the waist, watching the deliberate reveal of her breasts. Once the creep of the zipper reached its furthest point in the hollow of her lower abdomen, Thane slid his hands down to the tension of her ribcage, tucking his fingers under the fabric, cupping her breasts from beneath. Pressing them together, he freed them from the cloth, and seemed to luxuriate in their soft, pliable texture. She only realized she was holding her breath when the pads of his thumbs finally brushed across the nibs of her nipples, and a lightheaded cry was drawn from her.

* * *

Thane's world was anatomical. He plied his trade with his body. He monitored the advance of his illness. As a small child studying with the hanar, in tandem with practising how to read and write, he learned how bodies work, particularly bipeds. He studied how they moved, how they respired. He became literate in all the systems of air and blood and bone — and nerve. By puberty, he was intimately familiar with the physiology of all the known starfaring species. He knew a thousand ways to take life without causing pain. His mind was mapped with the topography of a body's sensitive points. He was trained to treat them gently, to tread lightly around them. His skill was killing without being discovered, whether by witnesses or by the victim's nervous system.

In this encounter with Commander Shepard's body, Thane could afford to be academic in his approach. He knew human anatomy well enough, but only knew abstractly how to pleasure them. Even more useful than this textbook knowledge was his skill in reading the communications of the body. She was making it easy for him, too. If body language had a volume, Shepard's would be screaming.

Who could look away from the hardened buds cresting the soft domes of her breasts? Her breasts were hypnotic enough as they were. They left nothing hidden, wobbling and soft as the glands beneath, with no scaly defensive hide to toughen their surface. The fine surgical scars tracing her body were like the ghosts of drell markings. Apart from those faint pinkish tracks, her skin was an ivory expanse punctuated only by the rosy wrinkles of her areolae.

The tentative flick of his thumbs across those magnetic poles elicited such a dramatic response that all of his apprehension was assuaged. He could trust his intuition.

He pinched them both, rolled them between thumb and forefinger, watching attentively to her reactions. He applied different pressure and angles, and committed each toss of her head, each startled cry to memory. At some point, her quaking became strained and halting, her cries bitten at the lip, after which she opened those over-dilated eyes and looked at him sheepishly. Thane's perfect memory made note of that as well. His investigation continued.

* * *

Somehow, Shepard knew herself to be a 'tough nut to crack'. Her memory abstractly informed her of having frustrated many boyfriends in the academy with her body's reticence to climax under their ministrations. Just as in her budding career, operations went best if she took matters into her own hands.

Maybe it was the new gear, maybe these drell chemicals in her brain, but she felt like a row of firecrackers on Alliance Day, and someone had tripped over one of them and set it off early. Points of light flashed in her eyes prompted by Thane's thorough manipulations, but she knew a whole other display was waiting to be ignited.

He didn't seem inclined to stop, anyway. He had tossed her rank and taken command. She felt an elation of freedom with this realization.

His hands dropping to her waist, Thane hoisted her and spun her nimbly with him, exercising the quickness of his upper body strength. She did not resist him, and he repositioned her neatly onto his lap while he sat on the edge of the bed. With the delicate touch of his cool fingertips, he slid the top of the bodysuit down her shoulders and off her wrists, to hang limply from her hips like a shed skin. Then his hands were firm at the small of her back, pressing Shepard to him to kiss again and again, then slid his grasp down to the compact curve of her ass, underneath the fabric, to aid her to slip out of the bottom half of the suit.

Finally detaching herself from their passionate liplock, she planted her feet and straightened her legs, bent in half over him like a VIP dancer on Omega. As she disengaged the buckles of his vest, he rolled the leggings down her thighs, taking with them the flimsy cotton of her panties. She kicked free of them, tossed his vest aside and slid back onto his lap, crushing her electrified skin against his bare chest. Shepard squeezed her eyes shut and reveled in the discovery that his lean, muscled torso was built in the same way as a human male's: no surprises apart from the alien brushed-metal smoothness of his scales, and the pleasant discovery that his markings do go all the way down. God, he was sexy.

She finally set her hands to feeling out the fastenings of his pants — and was suddenly scooped up in his arms.

Onto the couch she was tossed, her legs splaying as she landed. He loomed above her, predatory. Shirtless, Thane's pants were merely tugged askance by her efforts, a slanted beltline at his narrow hips. He was backlit, and Shepard's photosensitive eyes struggled to pick out the details of his tapered silhouette. Rid of his customary slim-fitting wardrobe, she could now perceive the bulky masculinity of his shoulders, the defined musculature of his torso. The reptilian texture of his skin only firmed up the taut crevices of his pectorals. As Thane moved towards her, there was an easy sway in his waist, spanned with hard-packed abdominal muscles.

Shepard was a marine, and an N7. Most of the men she'd fraternized with in her life were in peak physical condition. But Thane was beyond the generalized fitness of the military; he was honed to a precise and perfected ideal. She ought to have expected it, from the way he kept his sniper rifles so pristine. His primary weapon had always been his body.

The galaxy's greatest hired killer knelt at her side and suckled at her throat, as one hand slid down to explore the brilliant point of hot light between her thighs.

* * *

Thane almost feared for the progression of his disease, as the air in Shepard's cabin grew humid with her body's passion. It was a miracle of convergent evolution that human women shared most formal similarities with drell women in construction, although a human vulva was far more lewd in its soft, salacious unfurling. Thane also discovered a novel and fortuitous little button that seemed to be a sensual nexus, the manipulation of which consistently drove Shepard to greater heights of ecstasy. She crested those heights two or three times before he began to muffle her hoarse cries with impassioned kisses. She would need that voice to call directions in battle.

He experimented with ministrations fast and slow, explored her interiority with small deployments of fingers, discovered more bundles of sensuality in fleshy knots inside of her body. He pressed on them, coaxed wild physiological responses from her, evoked soft fluid spurts and moans and cries of every degree.

He could afford to be academic this time. She was lost in feeling. Her eyes had been squeezed shut for the last twenty minutes, and her only communication had become wordless exhalations and the undulations of her writhing hips. He understood them just as well, but also understood that she was on another plane now.

He wondered what visions were behind those eyelids.

He wondered if next time, he would have the strength not to kiss her, so that their first lovemaking would be with eyes that could truly see him.

He wondered if he was too presumptuous to conceive of a next time.

He withdrew his hands from her, coated with her musk. She moaned and let her legs fall open, still quavering from climax. Thane rose and went to wash up.

In the semi-solitude of the bathroom, he bent his head and gave thanks to Arashu, for having met the last love of his life.


	7. Chapter 7

Shepard was in no position to be disappointed Thane hadn't fucked her. She had come three? – four times? – and they were fucking transcendent climaxes, too. She couldn't wait to do more with him, although her heart secretly hoped they would be able to take their time.

Also, he had never taken his pants off. The mystery was killing her.

She stood and sauntered up the steps by the fish tank to find Thane with bowed head in the bathroom, communing with his gods. She paused to watch him, and felt the muscles of her cheeks burn with a grin that probably verged on lovestruck goofiness. His eyes finally opened and his gaze landed upon her, nude and leaning against the glass of her empty display case. His smile in return was like an orbital horizon: a flare of starlight around a planet's curve, visible only when the cockpit was oriented just so. Rare, heartbreaking, and precious.

"If that's how drell reproduce, I'm game for that forever," Shepard joked — but her voice was thickened by recent sensual fulfillment.

Thane dropped his head with a chuckle. "No, not quite, although I share the sentiment." He stepped toward her, drawing her close to him again. "I thought I might gain some field experience while you were… compromised." He looked down into her eyes, seeing her, but also gauging her irises. The orgasms had helped to clear her system somewhat, although without the sensory saturation of his hands all over her body, a ghostly seeker bug or two flitted in her peripheral view of the fish tank.

"I'm going to need you to stay here with me and make sure I don't mistake an airlock for an armoury." She pulled him to her for another kiss — no tongue, this time. It was awesome restraint, but she would need to come down from his psychedelic sooner or later.

"Understood, Commander." The newly subversive subtext of this formality shot a thrill up her spine. She nearly giggled.

N7s don't giggle.

That alone should have been indication enough. She was in well over her head.

* * *

Shepard's hair was back up in her chignon, freshly scented of shampoo. She hit the elevator for the CIC to plot a course for the evening shift. A disembodied voice flickered at her ear. "So how was it?"

Shepard's omnitool flashed and a cloaking device crackled, hit with an overload. A pixellated shimmer resolved itself into Kasumi Goto.

Kasumi must have slipped onto the elevator at the crew deck. Shepard had ridden down an extra level to steal a few more throat kisses from Thane before she resumed her post for the evening. Shepard was grateful that Kasumi hadn't been a hidden passenger for that.

Unless she'd been camping in the vestibule between the elevator and her cabin door. A wince flickered on Shepard's upper lip at the thought.

"You're an evil genius, Kasumi-san. How did you know?"

"I'm not stupid," the thief protested. "You two were gone together for a long time. You smell nice, by the way. As they say, scrubbing evidence is its own kind of evidence."

Shepard's lovestruck grin was back, and trying to wipe it away only made her mouth work in awkward ways. "Keep it to yourself, will you, Kasumi-san?"

"You know I only gossip to you, Shep."

The elevator opened to the CIC. At the sight of the galaxy map, twitterpated Shepard was instantly replaced with Commander Shepard, quick as a pistol shot. Kasumi, for her part, was either invisible, or gone.

Shepard strode to her post, her eyes hooded with seriousness. Over her shoulder, she asked Kelly, "Anything I should know?"

"Tali would like to speak to you in Engineering, Commander," the yeoman replied in her singsong voice.

* * *

Shepard's mind wandered during the ritual of strapping on her armour.

Garrus, Tali, Wrex: all figures from her last tour of adventures, all murky identities from her past. She had bluffed her way through the encounter with Wrex and immediately jetted from Tuchanka, leaving him nobody to question but antiproton exhaust. Garrus would never be shaken from her company, but he was easy to be around. He negotiated familiarity and fondness without crossing too many boundaries. Even when he did venture into an exposed position, he quickly withdrew again. After that awkward moment in Life Support, he made himself scarce for a while, and then returned to his usual self, cracking jokes on the crew deck. Turians made it easy. Or maybe that was just Garrus.

Tali was somehow trickier. Shepard liked her, a lot. They had a tremendous amount in common. They spoke the same language of technical jargon and shared a straightforward attitude toward problem-solving. Shepard found her rather adorable.

But Tali remembered everything about their travels together. They were the cherished memories of the Greatest Pilgrimage Ever. Every time Shepard sensed her gaze through the translucent glass of her mask, she felt the quarian bursting with stories and "remember when?"'s. Coming across her research logs on Haestrom, Shepard found her own name in every other entry, as a source of inspiration or larger-than-life figure deified by her own demise.

Shepard felt a strong push and pull to her interactions with Tali. She wanted to be friendly with her, and she could tell Tali desperately wanted this too, but Shepard's secret forced her to keep her distance. Tali remembered far more about the year before Shepard's death than she did.

Despite this, when she learned Tali was to stand trial for treason, Shepard was upset by it. Angry. She wanted to stand up for her compatriot.

Perhaps her body remembered more about their friendship than she did.

She plotted a course to intercept the Migrant Fleet without delay.

When it came to deciding who would accompany her and Tali onto the Rayya, Shepard found herself approaching the question from its flank. Who would be better than Thane?

She realized she was trying to wrestle with a worry of suddenly having a reason for the favouritism she'd displayed for him in her ground teams. Well no, that wasn't right. She always had a reason, but now they had done something illicit together, and if found out, it could be the only reason some people might see.

She never took much stock in Alliance policies against fraternization. People are going to fuck, and making it forbidden only brought out the darkest shades of soldiers' carnal pursuits. Marines developed feelings of all sorts for one another. With or without hormones, feelings inevitably modulated command decisions. In Shepard's experience — _or so the story goes_ — the most intense emotions, whether loyalty, hatred or desire, brought out secret depths of strength and willpower to achieve the impossible in a tight spot. In the N-program, they all learned well the necessity of leveraging everything they have — every skill as well as every hidden font of resolve or emotional combustion.

Or maybe that itself was the extraordinary quality of the Ns: the ability to transform, without exception, every structure in their personal landscape into a weapon. Maybe most people couldn't actually handle placing their lover in danger.

Shepard was comfortable with being the exception to the rule.

Besides, the way Shepard saw it, the only line that had been crossed with Thane was going from being possessed by a desire for his body, to having her body be possessed by his desire. The difference was logistical, at best. Arbitrary. Right?

But it never hurt to run a self-diagnostic against loin-directed bias, so: who would be better than Thane?

It would probably be a diplomatically delicate situation. Certainly her Cerberus crewmembers were out of the question. She wanted to downplay her affiliation with the pro-human fringe group as much as possible. Her destabilizing firestarters were also a no-go, so that excluded Jack, Samara, Zaeed and Grunt. Quarian resources were limited enough without letting a thief on board their liveships, so that excluded Kasumi.

Mordin, Garrus, or Thane? She wasn't sure she wanted Mordin's interventionist sensibilities on this visit. He might suggest some type of political meddling that would promise optimal results and be very difficult to unsee.

Garrus. Garrus could eat their food.

_But Thane knows what it's like for a species to lose its homeworld,_ she pointed out to herself. To be fair.

Garrus or Thane? Apparently this would be a recurring theme in her life.

She didn't want to be the only person unable to eat there anyway.

So it was Thane again, as usual.

Really, deviation from the pattern would have been more suspicious than taking him. By now, the rest of her ground team had adjusted to focusing on their ship responsibilities, since these days they were half as likely to be called upon for away missions. Miranda, Jacob, Garrus and Mordin had plenty to keep themselves busy in their respective office, armoury, battery, and lab, and the _Normandy _was humming along much more efficiently because of it. Samara was as patient as a Boddhisatva, and was mostly occupied with meditation after the resolution of her 400-year struggle with Morinth. The rebel squadmates in the lower decks had taken to competitive training games in the hangar. It was building great camaraderie among individuals who would otherwise be loners — and it kept the Cerberus maintenance staff busy with repairs after Jack and Grunt had left their marks on the bulkheads.

Besides, consistent physical activity was important for his health, to slow the advance of Kepral's.

Thane again? Wasn't she thinking about something else?

Shepard turned her thoughts to her anticipation of a firsthand view of the Migrant Fleet. She had a strong appreciation for design, and could only imagine a world comprised of a nomadic space archipelago constructed according to quarian values. With her colonial heritage, she shared the sentiment that there was nothing quite so satisfying as a good _repurposing_.

There: assembled and suited up, for once not to keep the bad stuff out, but to keep the bad stuff in and protect the quarians' sterile environments.

Her Death Mask dangled from her fingers as she strode through the CIC to the airlock. Tali was waiting there, wringing her hands and shifting her weight from foot to foot. Shepard couldn't imagine what she was going through; these were suboptimal conditions for a homecoming. She offered the quarian a smile, reached out her hand reassuringly. It was hard to tell if it got through to her, although Tali bowed her head briefly in acknowledgment.

Thane silently appeared at Shepard's side.

"Thanks for coming along," Tali said to them both. "I have to warn you, the decontamination procedures are pretty thorough, and you won't have an opportunity to take off your breathers until we're back on the _Normandy_."

"I'll make sure to give my nose a good scratch." Shepard patted the tip of her nose with a glint in her eye. She swung her Death Mask on and it clicked to her chestpiece with a soft hiss.

It occurred to her that she'd not yet seen Thane's breather. She turned to see him pull a flexible nano-synthetic weave over his head, an air filter integrated with ballistic mesh that fit snugly to his face. The look of it suddenly reminded her of bondage gear.

She was glad the Death Mask was on to hide her blush. Trusty old thing.

Decontamination was lengthy and arduous, especially for poor Tali, who kept shaking her head to herself, no doubt racking her brain for the source of the allegations against her.

"They should be decorating you for your achievements, not threatening you with exile. We'll find out what's going on," Shepard said softly to her.

Tali could only nod, distracted and meek.

The Rayya was one of the three Liveships of the Migrant Fleet, tremendous feats of engineering born of improvisation and necessity. When it became clear that there could be no return to their home cluster after the Geth War, the quarians needed to solve the problem of feeding their population. The Liveships were bootstrapped into agricultural arks, undergoing gradual augmentation with salvage, until their farming output was able to support seventeen million lives. The Rayya was an unrecognizable new organic form, iconic to the quarians, bearing little trace of the type of vessel it used to be in the days when quarians walked unmasked. Shepard's best guess was the Rayya had been some type of helium-3 transport, meant to integrate with large-scale mining infrastructure. The great vessel embodied repurposing at its best: breathing life into obsolete structures to meet new needs.

The light in the docking area was orange and murky, as though the air had rusted from excessive recirculation. How the place smelled was an unknowable mystery, since no one had taken a breath there sans filter for three centuries. Storage crates lined the passageway, some slightly askance from frequent use, but all carefully labeled. The atmosphere was surprisingly oppressive, not just because of Tali's growing agitation beside her.

Seeing someone she called "Aunty Raan" seemed to alleviate Tali's tension, but only added to Shepard's. Admiral Raan divulged two key pieces of intel: first, Tali was stripped of her ship name, making Shepard legally her captain. Second, it would be Shepard who served as her defence counsellor. It was clear to Shepard she was sharing only what she needed to. The admiral was holding back heavy secrets.

"Our legal rules are simple. There are no legal tricks or political loopholes for you to worry about. Present the truth as best you can. It will have to be enough."

So she said; and with her next move, she sent Tali in front of the Admiralty Board to be skewered through the heart. In the middle of the garden plaza, the young quarian was blindsided by the news that her father was likely dead, his ship overrun by geth that may have regenerated themselves from parts she had sent them from the field.

"Shepard, we have to retake the Alarei!" Tali said urgently. Yes, Shepard could see the importance of this mission: both to find Tali's father and evidence to exonerate her. It was decidedly not to pursue an honourable death, as she made clear with a pointed, "We'll be back."

* * *

"We're going to find my father, and we're going to punish those geth for what they did." Tali sat with grim stillness in the shuttle on the way to the Alarei. "They can't possibly be prepared for _you_, Shepard."

Beneath her mask, Shepard pursed her lips and looked away. The overt admiration would have felt awkward even if she had memories of what had impressed Tali so much. But her voice was soft and steady when she spoke. "You're also a star, Tali. It's you and I together who are going to turn this all around. Those geth are going to be hacked so hard they won't know their feet from their flashlights."

Tali was a masterful hack artist herself, with her own flock of combat drones. Between the two of them, they might as well have been boarding the Alarei with an army, equipped as they were to inflate the numbers on their side of any battle. Yet there was only so much inflation to be had, when facing a ship completely overrun with rogue geth. A quarian platoon had already attempted to board, and had made almost no headway before limping back with heavy casualties.

Shepard turned to Thane, helmet optics meeting in a cold, artificial eye contact. "Thane, things are going to get geeky out there. Tali and I will be bent over our omnitools waging cyberwarfare. Stay sharp, keep them off us, and call out positions. Keep it physical while we're fooling around in virtual environments."

Thane bowed his head sideways in acknowledgment in his particular way, which Shepard found so charmingly archaic.

"I don't want to have to do this." Tali's voice was low and melancholy. "I don't want to have to fight for my honour while searching for my father's… corpse."

First two dead teams, now charges of treason. Tali's spirit had taken a thrashing.

The shuttle was docking. Shepard leaned over with words just for Tali. "We've got this. You and me. Let's go."

The airlock cycled open, and it was time to fall back into the steady operations of battle. Tali called out hostiles on either side of the T-shaped hallway. Shepard slid into cover. The ship was dark, the life support systems powered down. They would be relying on the thermal readouts from their combat optics. The probability of finding survivors was beginning to edge that long statistical tail.

She signalled Tali to take the left group, while she took the right. They mirrored tactics: a steady sequence of overloading shields and transforming one geth apiece into a sacrificial lamb. The geth faced a berserking comrade on one side and a combat drone on the other — a pincer attack without Shepard's squad ever having to break cover. Any geth that got too close to the straightaway where they hid was softened up by a biotic warp and finished with a headshot from Thane's Viper.

"Good start," Shepard said when the death-whirring ceased.

"We should head for the labs." Tali pulled up a map of the ship in three dimensions to hover above her omnitool. "Maybe we'll find answers there."

Shepard nodded and indicated for her to take the lead.

Each room they passed through was hard-fought. Shepard fancied she could sense the growing desperation as they killed volley after volley of geth, their networked intelligence suffering with each small extinction event. She was personally rather ambivalent about the geth. As a tech-head, she might have been inclined toward sympathetic personification of them, but she found them disappointingly inefficient for a race of machines. She couldn't fathom why they needed to carry guns in mechanical arms, or why they even had heads that could be exploded with a well-placed sniper shot. Their design could be so much more streamlined. Was it some bizarre electronic sentimentality, unable to shuck the resemblance built into them by their creators? If she were the geth, she might have constructed herself more like a combat drone: quick and spherical, inscrutable, endowed with flight and micro-fabricators to fire any type of weapon she could imagine. Unfeeling and inhuman.

She _had_ been constructed, she realized, and it was Cerberus' vanity for their species that had kept her in this inadequate bipedal form.

Firing from cover, she executed three geth, stunned and spasming from her overload, with three shots from her pistol.

She made do with the inadequate bipedal form, all things considered.

Thinking of Thane's touch, she admitted that it also came with certain advantages.

The trouble with this mission was they were looking for negative evidence. How could they prove the absence of anything incriminating? The labs yielded only innocuous samples sent back by Tali from the field. Of course, that sort of difficulty had never stopped Shepard before. Her standard operating procedure was that she'd know what she needed when she saw it.

"Go get them, Chiktikka!" she heard Tali shout over the din of gunfire, and the quarian's purple-tinted combat drone zoomed past them into the thick of battle.

There was something lively about Tali's drones. They flitted and zapped like electric hummingbirds. While Shepard was more inclined to make her drones explode in a kamikaze last stand, Tali directed hers to dodge attacks and achieve some battle longevity. A drone with self-preservation — not at all unlike the geth. It suddenly seemed to Shepard like using an attack dog to snap at wolves.

"Shepard," came Thane's voice over the radio. He never shouted in battle, not once, but his warm rumble contained a note of warning.

She looked over her shoulder at the doorway where Thane was guarding their flank. A Prime with a court of troopers were swarming in from the next room.

It was the tipping point of battle, she realized. They had managed so far by scattering their attackers, fomenting chaos with well-placed hacks and herding them with combat drones. But the geth's strength had always been in numbers, and they had come to converge on their position.

The Prime was being knocked back continually by the hard blasts of Thane's sniper shots, but not enough. Troopers were surging through the door and around their leader like a nest of angry ants.

"Thane, join Tali to clear out that room ahead. I'm going to need somewhere to fall back to. On the double!" The military-speak was an old habit that only emerged when she was thinking too fast to moderate herself. The strategy was unfurling in her imagination, how to cycle this room with dodges and hacks to keep herself from being pinned down. She had to hold back the geth flanking manoeuvre, buy her teammates time to clear the room so they could present a single, unified front. Working alone, she could stay mobile and really fuck them up, Spectre style. She fell smoothly into motion, anticipating each step and counterattack, allowing her body to execute commands in the comparatively glacial pace of realtime as her mind raced well ahead.

_Hack one at the back. Surprise them with fire from the rear._

_Drone in the midst of them. They will turn to face it._

_A brief opportunity to spray with SMG fire. Go to next cover._

_That one's too close. Overload shields. Pistol shots to the big, dumb flashlight head._

_The Prime is the main target. Overload. Overload. Use the drone to keep the troopers off of me. Steady hand with my SMG._

_Check my HUD. Looks like it's at 2/3rds of its armour._

_Too close. Stagger them with an incinerate blast. Pistol shot. Pistol shot._

_Too close. Next cover._

A scream, over her radio. Tali.

If Shepard said the words "status report", it was from some automated subroutine of her mouth.

"Tali's down, but I have them," came Thane's steady murmur.

_Oh, you do baby._

She heard the thundering bursts of biotic explosions and the precision shots of Thane's Viper. If he hadn't switched to his sidearm, things were probably still in control up there.

Then she heard him grunt in the surprise of pain. They must have finally punched through his shields.

"Enough. Change of plans," she mumbled, and pulled out her particle rifle.

She bolstered her shields with some extra juice, stood from cover and trained the yellow beam of her Collector prize on the Prime's purposeless head. She fried the shields of the troopers trying to surround her and let the rifle's clip drain. The Prime was warbling what would be its last commands in that damnable digital chatter.

Dropping into cover, she reloaded the rifle while hacking another trooper, letting it get into fisticuffs with the geth nearest her. A second load of power cells in the particle rifle, she burned all of her rage into the giant robot's chest.

It died in a satisfying explosion.

"Now for the rest of you fuckers." She leapt over the workbench she had been hiding behind and dual-wielded her pistol and SMG, gunning them down in two directions. Their unshielded bodies dropped. She let her drone take the last kill, and fought down the urge to high-five it before it fizzled back into virtual storage.

She pumped her legs in a sprint back into the other room.

The first thing she saw was a geth trooper, its foot poised above Tali's inert form, about to crush her helmet.

The trooper snapped back in an electrical seizure in response to her overload attack. Nearly simultaneously, its head exploded from a single Viper round.

The shot came from behind a short glass wall where Thane crouched, about to be flanked on either side by two Hunters that had just come uncloaked.

"No!" Her overload was still recharging, and her plasma attack would be too slow. She picked one and blasted it with heavy pistol shots, hoping at least to slow it down.

Thane arched backwards as gracefully as water, undulating free of the shotgun blasts so the Hunters damaged one another instead. A smart kick sent one over the wall to tumble to a lower floor.

Shepard's incinerate attack was already arcing toward the other one, setting it ablaze. She trained her SMG on its head and fired a continuous blast until it was ashes.

She holstered her guns and waved a negligent hand, sending a drone to duel with the one that was damaged by the fall. She stalked over to Thane.

"Are you alright?"

"I am fine. Tali needs assistance."

She turned back to the quarian, who, almost as though sensing their attention, stirred from where she lay. "Uggh. I… think I had a suit puncture and my med systems overreacted." Her voice was slurring from painkillers.

"Yeah." Shepard set her omnitool aglow, and it registered a breach at the neckline of Tali's suit. Shepard moved to her and knelt by Tali's side. "It's in a bad spot. But…" She felt herself wince at what she was about to say. "We have to keep moving, Tali."

"I know." Tali was gloomy, but prevailed over her mood. "Luckily we're on a quarian ship. It should be pretty much sterile, and I'm surrounded by ways to patch myself up."

"Good thing," Shepard said, although she felt fairly mirthless. "Are you… bleeding in there?"

"Maybe I was, but it's sealed off now." Tali rose gingerly to her feet and walked toward a medical station mounted on the wall. She docked her wrist to it, and Shepard heard the rhythmic hiss of medigel being pumped in to refuel her suit's medical unit. With her free hand, she pulled open a drawer at a nearby desk, and after briefly feeling around, pulled out some squeeze tubes of suit patching gel.

"Could you…?" she asked Shepard, indicating the breach at the back of her neck.

Using her omnitool readout to guide her, Shepard isolated the crevice and daubed the gel into the gap, sealing it with a carefully calibrated application of heat. She'd done hardsuit field repairs many times before, but this still demonstrated tremendous trust from a quarian. She felt a low burn in her heart, wondering if she had truly earned that trust. Or still deserved it, after marginalizing Tali'Zorah on the SR-2.

Everything needs repair, sometimes.

Just then, Shepard's drone floated up to rejoin them after completing its work of destroying the last geth.

"Good job, –" Tali cut herself off. A name was meant to be at the end of that sentence, but the drone didn't have one.

Shepard let the drone fizzle out. "It works for electrons, not praise."

"But you've been through so much together. How do you not get attached?"

It was an uncomfortably good question.

"You know, I… I used to. But it's been a long time."

"What do you mean?" Tali's curiosity had gotten the better of her weariness.

That weariness was not negligible, however. The quarian was swaying on her feet. A quick radar check: it seemed they were all clear for the moment. The geth would need time to regroup after the failure of this aggressive attack. Not much time, but Shepard would take it. They could break for a story, to take Tali's mind off things and let the medigel help her shake off the injury. Plus, this was a story with no other witnesses, and so no worries of being caught with a missing detail. It would be good practice for Shepard. She needed a remedial class in talking about herself.

"As a kid growing up, I couldn't get enough of VIs of all sorts. It was boring as hell on Mindoir: isolated, not a lot of kids around to play with. So, like the epic super-geek I was, I built friends."

She heard the soft laugh from Tali. It was the reaction she'd hoped for.

"I had all kinds of custom-built VIs and drones. Fliers and walkers and even some with little novelty cloaks. Basic one-note virtual personalities, but decently configurable. A lot of them looked like different kinds of animals." The story had started like a recitation, but memories were starting to unexpectedly fuzz into existence. She had a sudden vivid recall of a small stegosaurus, the same bright orange as her combat drone today. She faltered.

From his sniper's perch on an upper level by the door, Thane was watching her through the combat optics of his hood, still as a gargoyle.

She pressed on, partly so Tali wouldn't notice anything awry, partly because she desperately did not want to lose this thread, as the tale began to coalesce into a substantial memory.

"My parents didn't mind at all. In fact, I think they encouraged me. They'd had careers before arriving on the colony, as tech specialists and material scientists who'd decided to opt for a simpler life on an agrarian colony." It had seemed strange to her then, but they had not lived past her reticent teenage years. She had never taken the opportunity to ask. The thought made her new heart ache in an old way.

"When the slavers attacked, my father locked me in a storage silo. He destroyed the door mechanism from the outside. You know I… I never figured out exactly how he masked my heat signature. I guess he still had some old tricks." These thoughts, these feelings were worn like an athletic track, years of pounding feet in circles around questions. Like Ashley and Virmire, not even her own death had managed to dull the edges of these blades. "I also never figured out why slavers would come and take no one alive. Seems… counterproductive.

"I still had my omnitool, though." She looked at the glow of her wrist, now many model upgrades later — even to the wrist itself. "I was a precocious little shit, and had one fitted as soon as I turned twelve. By the time I was sixteen, there was nothing left of the manufacturer's still in that thing. It was all tweaked and custom, able to do any silly thing I could think of.

"My whole fleet of toys, my little VIs, some of them I'd had since I was very, very small: I could interface with them with my tool, from inside the silo where my dad locked me, while the batarians were systematically murdering everyone else in the colony. Those drones kept me alive. I could see outside through their little cameras. I could get one to run interference while another would sneak me food and water through a window about ten metres up."

"Sneak you food?" Tali asked in a hush.

"I was there for about nine days, give or take." The sensations were evaporating into just facts, once again. "I managed to get some of those batarians pretty good too, by overloading a couple fuel tanks at opportune times. It wasn't smart, but it was satisfying. It probably delayed their departure by quite a bit. They knew there was a survivor, and she was righteously pissing them off." She tried to laugh bitterly, but it felt hollow and inauthentic. "They didn't leave until the Alliance cruiser arrived."

She sighed, rising to stretch and get ready to head out. Her radar was starting to warn of geth signals gathering just out of range. "I was pretty mixed up by the time they found me. The Alliance grunts got majorly pissed off when they realized the 'other survivors' I was begging them to find were actually beaten up VI toys. Most of those old things had gotten irreparably fried by the batarians along the way, anyway." At this point in her tale, she was numb. It didn't feel like a lacuna; it was more like enforced sensory silence, a psychological shutdown. Maybe that itself was the authentic experience of the old Shepard.

"Those VIs were so real to me. They had become so important, especially after I spent nine days whispering to them in the dark."

Tali's slow nod was contemplative. "That's why VI toys are taboo among quarians. Getting attached to them looks too much like relating personally to AIs. Some say it makes kids grow up to be geth apologists."

"Humans have a bit of that stigma too." Shepard considered herself an iconoclast, but this decision dated to her younger days: "When I joined the Alliance, I really forced myself relate to the drones as just tools. It wasn't a reputation I wanted, being the traumatized little girl who confused VIs for real lives. Especially since it wasn't true. I knew all the colonists were dead. I found their bodies." She paused. "Well, I'd seen them. My scuttle drone found them. That was what broke me, confused me, in the first place."

Tali gasped. The sound was all midrange, the trebles and lows filtered out by her suit. "You… saw them?"

"Yes." Shepard considered a moment before speaking. This story had always been for Tali's benefit. She let the narrative hammer fall. "I found my father's body first. He hadn't actually gotten that far from the silo before they got him. It was…" She searched for words that would seem right. The encyclopaedic version of this event, as supplied by her cyborg brain matter, was of no sentimental use at all. "It was the worst thing in the entire world, Tali. The gravity well just dropped out from under me." It seemed like an appropriate enough metaphor — far better than, say, 'I don't actually know, but my guess is it was really, really bad'.

Tali's mask was angled away. The subtext of their current situation, in search of her father after a slaughter, was ringing dully on the walls of the darkened room.

"But he was lying there because he loved me. That was it. That was all there was."

And that was all she could say. All of her knowledge.

Tali's helmeted head hung, but not due to the weariness of lingering pain medication. She was weighed down by the anticipation of grief. Loss was about all the things that would never be said, would never be asked, would never be shared. Confronting death, perceiving the cadaver, was the final bulkhead slam that isolated breached compartments to the sterile vacuum of space.

Shepard's father spent his last moments trying to keep her safe. That kind of love communicates from beyond the grave — both of their graves. Receiving that transmission made healing possible, then and now.

Shepard hoped there would be a message for Tali.

She outstretched a gauntleted hand to the quarian, an unspoken inquiry if she was ready. Tali bobbed her head in a nod, and moved toward the locked door on the opposite side of the room.

"This should take us towards the command centre of the Alarei." The tremor in her voice was contained, all things considered. "If anything I sent back was more dangerous than what we found in the labs, they would be brought here."

She unlocked the door to find their secondary objective twisted on the deck, a lone corpse suited in admiral designations.

What prescience had led Shepard to share her story, when Rael'Zorah's body lay just beyond the threshold of that door? It was the same dumb luck, the same amoral synchronicity that had spared her head of countless flying bullets and pieces of shrapnel, had brought rescue not a moment too late time and time again. Shepard led a charmed life of improbable survival through the incalculable twists of events, the continual making-right of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and sometimes, like this time, it made her look like a battlefield prophet, sharing a story immediately prior to its profound relevance.

"No… no," sobbed Tali over her father's corpse. Shepard knelt by her, her armoured bulk offering consolation through proximity. "Maybe… maybe he knew I would come. Maybe he left a message."

There was always a message. Always, in some form or another.

It was eerie to watch her activate the omnitool of her dead father. To Shepard, quarians were so much a part of their suits, it seemed like he was being unnaturally reanimated — although it was ironic as hell for her to be squeamish at the thought of reviving the dead.

Shepard had talked big about fatherly love and last stands, but Rael's message to Tali contained little sentiment. He only urged her to share the data in the mainframe with the other admirals. Shepard kept silent on that observation.

"C'mere," she said softly to Tali, and embraced the smaller woman. There was something heartwrenchingly isolated about the tears of a quarian. It was impossible for anyone to wipe them away.

Perhaps they were reconstituted, cycled and processed by the suit into something to sustain her.

It was surely a strengthened Tali, and not a weakened one, who finally rose and said, "Come on. Let's finish this."

* * *

Shepard saw it, and she knew it. The evidence they needed was in Rael'Zorah's own voice, emphatically directing his subordinates to keep Tali uninvolved with his illegal treatment of the geth parts she was sending him. There was his love for his daughter, motivating him to commit atrocities to be able to give her the gift of their homeworld. Except Tali was begging Shepard to promise to bury it.

Shepard's gut was telling her this was out of the question.

"Tali, without this evidence, you're looking at exile."

"You think I don't know that? You think I want to live knowing that I can never see the Fleet again? But I can't go back into that room and tell them that my father was the biggest war criminal in our people's history! I cannot!"

"Rael'Zorah doesn't need you to worry about him anymore," Shepard tried again. "You heard him say he didn't want you to be caught in the politics."

"You don't understand, Shepard. They would strike his name from the manifest of every ship he ever served on. He would be worse than an exile. He'd be a traitor to our people, held up for children as a monster in a cautionary tale! I can't let all the good he did be destroyed for this, Shepard!"

Shepard licked her lips, briefly uncertain under the stoic face of her mask. This could kill any hope of friendship with Tali. It could break her heart. But Shepard was a principled woman, and a commander. She sent good people to their deaths in order to do what she deemed was The Right Thing. She was willing to live with fouling a relationship with an old friend.

"I can't let all the good you've done be buried either, Tali." The decision made, her voice was low and steady. "And I won't let you play cover-up like the Council after Sovereign. Or for that matter, Saren!" The words rolled from her with seething conviction. "Goddammit, Tali, you know this: the truth _always_ comes out. And it comes out because there are people like you, exceptional people who know the value of the truth, who will risk their lives to deliver evidence to the right people, the way you did when we first met."

Tali had no retort, standing deflated before her. So Shepard continued.

"I came here with you because I knew you were innocent of these charges, that you would never commit treason against the Flotilla. Now you want to knowingly withhold evidence of your father's research from the Admiralty Board? Destroy it, even? From where I'm sitting, _that's_treason, Tali, and I consider it a _mission failure_ to let you commit it."

A wail heaved itself through Tali's body, and she threw her arms around Shepard, the smooth visor of her mask crushing against an N7 shoulder guard with a glassy _chink_. "I know Shepard, I know, I know," she sobbed. "I just–"

She collapsed into wordless weeping, for her father, for the Alarei, and for the brink from which she had just been snatched.


	8. Chapter 8

Tali requested to stay behind on the Rayya for few days, to heal and debrief after the evidence was delivered to the Admiralty Board. Garrus volunteered to join her and give her support, since mourning her father publicly would not be an option. In her grief, Tali barely choked out a goodbye as Shepard turned to board the _Normandy_: "Thank you, Shepard. As usual, you rescued everything important."

Shepard squeezed the quarian's shoulder. It felt like such an insufficient gesture behind the faceless stoicism of her helmet, but she supposed it was standard for quarians. "We won't go far, Tali."

She looked to Garrus, and registered the curt nod of his own impassive breather helmet. Tali was in good hands.

In the airlock, Shepard pulled off her helmet and shook out her hair, patting her cheeks to restore sensation there. Thane carefully rolled his mask over his head ridges. After slipping free of it, he looked at her curiously.

"What?" she asked.

"You have a way with words, siha."

"Maybe, but with your voice, you could say anything and I'd lap it up." Her intonation went inadvertently sultry on the last three words.

He dropped his gaze with what might have been a mildly embarrassed smile. "You are corroborating my point."

Shepard couldn't help her grin as she reached out to clasp his gloved hand in her own gauntlet. It was a bulky and inadequate contact, but she thirsted for it nonetheless. She was in a good mood. She felt like she'd cheated the system and won, fulfilling all mission parameters without giving an inch of compromise. Tali would grieve, and heal, no doubt more easily than she would have if they'd kept the burden of that secret and she'd withstood punishment in her father's place.

Thane, though, was more pensive. "I cannot help but wonder, Shepard; if you had turned that same charm on the Admiralty Board, perhaps you could have convinced them that the evidence was never important in the first place."

"Mm," was all Shepard said. She tried to avoid the construction of hypothetical alternate histories. The sanctity of the _decision_, once made, was the keystone to successful command.

Also, she'd be damned if she tried to slither free of honest testimony to the Admiralty Board. She killed people for lying about that sort of shit. Not only did Commander Shepard have a duty to the truth, but the engineer in her knew that concealing a catastrophic miscalculation of the scale of the Alarei could only end up costing the quarians more lives. Rael'Zorah's failure was not one that the quarians could afford to repeat.

She would not blithely disadvantage the galaxy's largest fleet. Not with the Reapers on their way.

She hit the panel to open the airlock door.

Thane lingered by the elevator as Shepard moved through the CIC, collecting reports from subordinates of all divisions. She tucked a number of datapads against her hip and finally stepped into the elevator with him. She pressed the indicator to go to her loft, and, once again, Thane did not touch the panel.

"I thought we could talk." He held her in the fixed gaze of his eyes, black as the space between stars.

She raised her brows at him. He didn't react.

Not a euphemism, then.

"Alright, but I'm changing out of my armour first. I hope that's not a problem."

That was a lie. She hoped the thought of her undressing posed a big problem for him. The bigger the better, really.

He smiled, only at the corners of his lips. The rest of him was slyly unyielding. "Not at all. I shall serve as your squire." There was a prickle at the back of her neck; Shepard sensed that he had already turned the tables on her, somehow.

When the elevator door opened, she expected him to grapple her against the wall and crush his mouth over hers. He did not. Instead, they stepped together into her cabin, as civil as though they each arrived there alone.

She watched him casually move about the room, looking at her fish and her hamster, fingering some medals strewn carelessly across her desk. She stacked her reports on the bedside table — they were her usual bedtime reading — and set her helmet within the adjacent armour locker. She reached to unclip her left shoulder guard, and suddenly he was behind her, his hands on the hidden clasps, lifting it away. She heard him set it to rest in the locker, and turn to the next one.

The whisper of his hands on the back of her neck and shoulder at once relaxed and electrified her. She exhaled, letting her eyelids fall half-shut. Moving to pull off each gauntlet, he ran his hands along her arms, waking her skin to sensation after its term of encasement. She turned to face him so they could pull away her chestplate together. Her cheek brushed against his throat as he reached around her to power down the shield cells. She could feel her nipples already becoming hard points, epicentres of the tingles shivering across her skin. Moments later, with the chestpiece in the locker, he was able to see for himself, through the thin white synth-weave of her thermals. He smiled without ego at the effect he had on her.

He knelt and unhooked her greaves, allowing her to step free of them. His grip slid up her thighs, caressing her adductors. She sucked in a breath at his touch, suddenly feeling very warm. He must feel it too.

Her armour was put away, stacked in a much more orderly fashion than they were customarily, even though he had hardly glanced away from her as he disposed of each component. He rose and looked at her with those eyes like inscrutable lenses into the sensory archive of his soul.

She unzipped her bodysuit with breathless haste, the sleeves going inside out as she pulled herself free. She rolled the suit down over her legs and carelessly kicked it away. She wanted him, so much, she moved to crush her body against those shiny black buckles on his vest, hard enough to leave marks on her skin–

But they weren't there. Instead, there was something between them. She drew back, curiosity sobering her from her feverish embrace, to find that he had pulled out her dress — the black one — and was holding it out for her to get dressed again.

A sound of petulant frustration gurgled in her throat. "Really?" she demanded of him.

He laid the dress on the bed. "I thought we could talk." He turned aside to sit on the couch, his body language indifferent but with a subtly upturned quirk in his lips. Smug bastard.

She scowled, and turned to rifle through her drawers of underclothes for a fresh pair of panties. She felt his eyes on her as she bent, nude, at her cabinets. He has a flawless photographic memory — surely he has no purpose in staring! She shot a glance at him over her shoulder, and caught the glassy half-smile that seemed to be universal to males of all sentient species. Found out, he murmured a short "hm!" and adjusted his posture.

It was very strange for Shepard, to be visually appraised by a non-human like this, even if his response was incontrovertibly positive. Her body was a weapon, an interface for killing, built for combat and not titillation. She had always wondered at the sinuous curves of asari dancers; what calisthenics did they do to achieve that effortlessly sexual athleticism whose snare transcended species? Certainly not anything like N-training. That process left a person a scarred and hardened wreck.

Her scars from N-training, of course, were gone, and replaced by entirely new ones. She hadn't even been conscious for _those_ fresh horrors.

What did drell find sexy, anyway?

Well, as far as cross-species proclivities went — she found _him_ sexy, and it was partly _because_ his body was a honed interface for killing.

Very. Honed.

Her mind stuttered, tripping over the visual memory of his body as he stood over her by the couch, lean and powerful and backlit the way he was when they first met in Nassana's office.

She wiggled a pair of panties over her hips, and slid the dress over her head. She was driving herself wild, and they weren't even near each other. _He wanted to talk. _She pushed past the clamoring of her arousal the way she pushed past pain in the battlefield._ So let's talk._

She unpinned her hair, and took a hairbrush from a drawer beside her bed. "What can I do for you, Krios?" She flipped her hair over her head and began to brush it, methodical, back to front.

It took him a moment to respond. From upside-down, she saw the voyeuristic gleam in his eye before he could start talking. _Well, I think I've figured out that aliens really like a girl with nice hair. Take _that_, asari._

He rose and slowly approached her. He outstretched a palm so the ends of her wavy locks could shiver across it while she ran her brush across her crown. "You are a complex, magnificent woman, Shepard." His tone was musing rather than effusive. "I feel I learn so much about you every time I accompany you on a mission. This time, I learned about the fate of your birthplace."

She swallowed. She flipped her hair back and began twisting it up again, pinning it into place without use of a mirror.

His outstretched hand curled in slightly. He ran his thumb across his pads of his fingers, as though cherishing the tactile memory of her hair. "It was a difficult story for you to tell, I am certain. And it was cleverly timed. I believe it did help Tali with what she was about to discover." His hand rose to trace his fingertips along her temple, lightly tracking the curve of her orbital bone. He closed the distance between them in a single fluid step. "The story helped me as well. I was able to see one large part of what has made you the woman you are." He pressed his lips to her forehead with a murmur of blessing. She closed her eyes. The soft purring in her head could have been coming from either of them.

"And I sensed that it was also a discovery for you."

How well must he know her, to have registered that slight hitch in her voice, the briefest of hesitations when the images began to coalesce in her head? All without recourse to her facial expression under the visorless, impassive Death Mask?

"The memories began to return to you."

With Thane Krios, it was always a perfect headshot. _Boom_. He got directly into her head.

"What does your religion say about that?" Her breathless delivery undermined her weak attempt at a joke.

Thane glanced down, smiled. He turned away to look at the fish tank. "It is only religion, Shepard. It gives answers when we seek them, and offers miracles at the limits of those answers."

She looped her arm around his, drew herself against him. By the subtlest of increments, his posture relaxed at her side.

"Miraculously, I think we see the first signs of you recovering your lost lifetime." She felt the vibrations of his voice in her ear.

She suddenly perceived in herself a resentful ambivalence to her past, when her present with him was so real and full of promise. And so brief.

"If telling stories helps, siha, you know you always fascinate me."

The man with eight-to-twelve months to live was volunteering to listen to her narrate 29 years of lost memories, in hope of helping her regain some indefinite quality to those experiences.

She didn't want to talk about the past. She didn't want to talk about their future, if they had one, if they would live to return from the Omega-4 relay for the privilege of seeing Kepral's Syndrome finally claim him.

She only wanted now.

She pressed her cheek to his shoulder. Through one eye, she watched their ghostly reflections in the wobbling waters of the fish tank. She ran the palm of one hand along his sleeve, feeling the small bumps and ridges of his skin, the sinewy roll of his muscles through his jacket.

Then, Joker's voice over the comm. "Uh, Commander, we've disengaged from the Rayya, so whenever you're ready you can call up a destination from the Galaxy Map."

"On my way." She was able to summon her usual authoritative voice despite being nestled against the leather-clad shoulder of a drell in her private cabin.

He lifted her face to plant a chaste kiss on the corner of her mouth. "You know where I will be if you need me."

He turned and left, leaving the scent of spice in his wake.

Shepard heaved a tremendous, uncharacteristic sigh, and thudded her balled fists into the tops of her hips. "Shut up," she told her ovaries. "He can't give you what you want."

She steeled herself for the elevator ride to the CIC, still feeling the ghost of his touch at her chin.

* * *

With only a few days before needing to return to the Migrant Fleet to pick up Tali and Garrus, the _Normandy_ had few options of ways to use their time, and no interesting ports of civilization in the Valhallan Threshold. Shepard was just about to pass command to Miranda so she could get some of her damnable resource mining done, when Chambers edged close to her elbow.

"You know, in the Micah system, one of its gas giants is about to capture a comet as a new moon." Kelly's voice was lowered conspiratorially, as though she were sharing fleet secrets instead of some astronomical event being hyped in the feeds. "It could be amazing to see. It's just so lucky for us to be in the cluster during such a rare event."

"I didn't know you were a stargazer, Kelly."

"I'm not really, it's just that we have some time and it would be such a cool and special thing that we could witness. I think it would be… romantic."

Shepard looked at Kelly dubiously. It was always so hard to tell if the yeoman was hitting on her, or trying to get her to hook up with someone else. Meanwhile, there was something familiar about the name she cited.

"The Micah system… isn't that place full of pirates?"

"Yes but if we stay stealthed I'm sure they'll leave us alone–"

"Joker! Take us to the Micah system. Let's look like astro-tourists, see if we can lure us some pirates for a good old-fashioned dogfight."

Kelly went wide-eyed. "That's not what I–"

Shepard loved making Kelly make that face.

"Aye aye, Commander," said Joker, the smirk in his voice just a little bit brighter than usual. "Setting a course for trouble."

* * *

Mess Sergeant Gardner's idea of party hors d'oeuvres was to take the same food they'd been eating for weeks and cut it into bite-sized pieces. For that reason, most of the people gathering in the port observation deck were far more interested in the drinks.

_If we do get boarded by pirates,_ Shepard thought, _having half my team drunk on their asses might actually make it a fair fight._

Joker placed the _Normandy_ into a graceful orbital arc such that the port lounge would get a perfect view of the comet as it approached the first planet of Micah. The star was huge and very close, but the Jovian planet of Elohi kept it in partial eclipse for the ship shadowing its orbit. Kelly had worked with EDI to apply a tasteful digital overlay on the window to highlight the comet as it was approaching. The party was called for about an hour before the spectacle would begin.

Truly, it was improbable timing for them to be there to catch this event. For once, Shepard's right-place-right-time career might lend itself to lighthearted merriment.

Shepard stood by the door, a mostly-full drink in her hand. She looked over her crew as they clustered in conversation and collided with laughter, socially orbiting one another not much unlike astral bodies. Zaeed had gotten started early on the whisky, as evidenced by the loud slur in his voice and the optimal seat he occupied at the bar. Grunt sat on the floor listening to him, and Jack was perched on the bartop, interrupting him with quips but poorly concealing authentic interest in his tale. Chakwas swirled her wine glass and smiled as Mordin talked over-fast at her. Kasumi had asked Jacob to move something heavy in her part of the room, and was biting her lip while watching him do it. Ken and Gabby stood by the window arguing about the visibility of the comet's tail, and the path it would take. Their vehement disagreement was punctuated by laughter, and tempered by standing quite close to one another.

Thane was a professional at fading into the background, at adapting fully to the norms of his surroundings to become firmly of no note to an observer. Shepard knew this, and yet her eyes continually went to him, seeking him out, eventually finding him. He stood in a darkened spot adjacent to the bar, a faint smile on his lips as Kelly Chambers continued to talk enthusiastically at him. He held his drink — about as full as Shepard's — loosely in one hand, the other tucked in the small of his back. His formal, polite posture was open enough to permit conversation, but closed enough to give him always the panoptic advantage.

Kelly kept touching his elbow as she spoke, in a fantastically clichéd vision of a woman communicating interest. Shepard leaned against the bulkhead with a private grin. Kelly had told her, when Thane was first recruited, that she couldn't decide if she thought he was scary or sexy. Shepard wondered if the look she'd given Kelly in response had swayed her eventual decision.

She caught Thane's eye for an instant before he let his gaze return to its steady and conversational parade rest. He would never be rude enough to let Kelly catch on that he was distracted by another woman in the room, but Shepard could sense a bloom of warmth behind the same polite smile. It wasn't for Kelly, but she didn't need to know that.

The crew swirled off in trios and pairs, engaging with each other, relaxing, bonding. But she and Thane stood on opposing borders of the scene, patiently staking out one another.

"What, you think we don't know? We know."

It was Joker, coming late to the party after it became clearly unnecessary for him to babysit their stable orbit. He had agreed to make an appearance only if Shepard promised to sling him over her shoulder and haul him back to the cockpit at the first sign of pirates.

She turned to look at him. "Glad you could make it, Joker." She pointedly ignored his opening line.

"No, seriously Commander, if you're holding back out of a sense of military propriety, let me remind you that we are now part of an unregulated paramilitary organization. And also not blind."

"It doesn't seem so obvious to Kelly." Shepard gestured to the two of them with her drink.

"Ah, Kelly," Joker sighed with an affected fondness. "Kelly was always going to _try_. She's like that guy at the bar who'll hit on girls who are completely out of his league, because he knows it only has to work once. Totally, stupidly, fearless." He turned to mutter to himself, "Damn those guys."

Kelly abruptly reached out to try to touch the layered, accordion texture of Thane's dark red throat. Quicker than thought, he grabbed her wrist out of the air to stop her. Her agape and giggly apology was returned with an affable half-bow, as he lowered her hand back to her side before releasing it.

"It's because he's ticklish there." Shepard turned to grin at Joker.

"Jeez, just because we know doesn't mean we _want_ to know. Don't tease the cripple with the kinky shit you super-soldiers do in the bedroom."

Shepard heaved a tortured, whimpering sigh of exquisite pleasure, mostly to piss off her pilot. It made Jacob turn his head from his side of the room.

"Aah! And definitely don't do _that_ again." Joker covered his ears with a dramatic wince. "You can pull whatever succubus horrors you want on Thane, but leave the rest of us out of it."

Shepard laughed, and punched Joker lightly on the shoulder in a way that communicated that she knew his limits, but wouldn't treat him like he was made of glass, either. "Tell me that's not what you think of your commanding officer."

"What, you're disappointed that I don't want to be included? I didn't know you felt that way, Commander."

She rolled her eyes with an affectionate "_t-chhh_" in her throat, and they stood companionably for a moment.

"You know, giving relationship advice is usually not my deal, but as a fragile but dignified and _highly _competent man myself–" Joker softened his joking bravado before he continued. "I hope you're not going to be too cruel to the guy. I know you have your own thing going on and need to find your ways to get through the day, but… he really likes you. So if you're just having your way with him for now… let him down easy."

This was unexpected. Did she really broadcast such a nakedly predatory image? Did she seem so emotionless?

What were her feelings for Thane anyway? The top stratum of her thoughts on him were all bound up in physical want, and there had been no saccharine discussion between them to establish what they felt, the way they do it in vids.

No, that wasn't exactly true. Thane had said something. She hadn't.

_I confess, I have come to care for you. Perhaps I'm being foolish. We are very different._

Then she had shut him up with a kiss, pursued her own desires with him.

Her long, contemplative silence proved too much for Joker.

"I just thought, after seeing Kaidan on Horizon… I just felt really bad for the guy. It's totally not my place, and, in fact, I think I need to go to the med bay because I think I've got a femoral fracture from putting my foot in my mouth. Well, great party, see ya Commander!" He began a laborious whirl to head out the door.

She stuck out an arm to block him from leaving. "You didn't put your foot in your mouth. In fact, I should really talk to you more often." Her voice was low, and tired, and serious.

God, Kaidan. When she saw him on Horizon, her mind was already buzzing with thoughts about the newly-encountered Collectors. Then he blindsided her with a nuclear emotional payload. Unlike Wrex, she had recognized his face, at least, but she had no recall of the dynamics of their relationship. She didn't know what to do with his anger, she had nothing to patch together when he implied a night before Ilos, and later, she reasoned that whatever they might have had together, it couldn't have been _that_ serious. He had so little faith in her, seemed not even to know her, to think that she would really have become a radical pro-human terrorist.

But from the outside, it looked like a spurned lover, heartbroken victim of a one night stand, discovering that she had never really cared in the first place.

She was not that woman. She would not be that woman with Thane. There wasn't time for that.

She really should talk to Joker more often.

"Five minutes to orbital capture," EDI announced, and Kelly darkened the lights.

Joker was very good, and not just at making well-timed observations. Placing the _Normandy_ in Elohi's penumbra meant that the comet would be coming straight across the view from the port lounge, between them and the planet. Its tail shimmered against the inky blackness of space, stretched out to an indefinite point behind it. A stream of ice and dust glowed every shade of blue. It looked like it should have been making a soft fizzing sound, but instead the lounge was nearly as quiet as the dead of space. Everyone, even the hardened soldiers, seemed startled into silence by how breathtaking it was, this phenomenon of an indifferent universe.

The comet crossed in front of the star, briefly lost to sight. Then it reappeared more gloriously than before, thrown against the stark blackness of Elohi's gaseous nighttime surface. It suddenly seemed so close, and shades of emerald green and brilliant diamond white flamed in the halo of its coma.

She felt Thane's touch on her arms. He had stepped up behind her, having crossed the room as silent and unnoticed as a shadow. She leaned back against him, and felt his breath at her ear, ragged with emotion.

"Thane, don't you have those ocular implants that allow you to see hanar ultraviolet bioluminescence?" came Chakwas' tenuous voice in the darkness.

"Yes." Thane's gravelly reply was the crumble of sandstone, succumbing to the pressures of exquisite and relentless nature.

Shepard felt his cheek press against hers, felt the cool roll of a single tear moisten the junction of their skin.

The comet gracefully arced, fireworking its trail around the rim of Elohi's gravity well. It seemed briefly to double-back, before it finally vanished on the other side of the planet. Its untold millennia of solitary travel had finally brought it to rest, pair-bonded with this silent, uninhabited gas giant.

It was a moment that was so beautiful, so special, that it seemed to be striving to recompense for the cumulative horrors that Shepard and her teammates had individually endured in life. It was the galaxy whispering, _it was all worth it, it will all be worth it_.

And Thane's eyes, to which the world was running out of time to prove that point — fittingly, he received the most beautiful display of them all.

Shepard turned away from the window. There could be nothing there more important than seeing her lover's face at that moment.

Her lover.

Her love.

His face was composed and still, but his eyes were in an agony of beauty, transfixed by the window, seeing the long tail of ultraviolet light that was invisible to everyone else in the room.

She slipped her arms inside his jacket and held him, nestling her face into his chest. He unfroze just enough to draw a hand up and rest it on the back of her neck, mutely stroking his thumb along the beating rhythm of her carotid artery.

"That was… kinda alright," came Jack's understated concession from the direction of the bar.

"Hey, uh, that's _my_ hand, Donnelly," said Jacob.

With the resultant peal of laughter from the group, Kelly took the opportunity to switch the lights back on.

And there were Shepard and Thane, suddenly illuminated, entangled in one another's arms, a pocket of quiet intimacy amidst the mirth of the rest of the group. Their intense _stillness_ was so inviolable that nearly everyone averted their eyes.

"Ha ha, Battlemaster. Don't break him, he's useful," Grunt said, pushing himself off the floor. "Where's dinner?"

More laughter, but tentative this time. Shepard looked up at Thane and found him smiling back at her. She reached up to gently thumb away the line of his tears. They were so lost in one another, they hardly noticed as the rest of the guests began to file out of the room, passing them with encouraging and supportive gestures or, particularly directed at Thane, awed looks.

"Let's go," Shepard whispered, hooking her index fingers around Thane's. It was her inventive solution to hand-holding with finger-webbing. "Pirates would have made their move by now. It sounds like we might have a quiet night."

Or an opportunity to be undisturbed while they made the night anything but quiet.

Thus interlocked, they nearly made it to the elevator.

"Commander, before you are indisposed." EDI's voice came from a terminal which had just popped to life.

Shepard quirked a brow. 'Indisposed'? Was her ship making a joke?

"Yes?" Shepard's patience was not feeling particularly elastic.

"What would you like to do with the five pirate vessels I disabled during the comet's orbital capture?"

Thane's shoulders were shaking in silent laughter, probably at the look on Shepard's face.

"Hold. That. Thought," she said emphatically at Thane. "And meet me in my cabin after I'm done dealing with this."

It was an embarrassment of riches, to be caught between her two loves: Thane Krios, and command of her ship.

Two loves.

"Shall I vent their holds and eject them into space?" EDI's voice was as placid as usual, but damn it was sinister to hear her suggest it first.

"No, EDI. I'll be right up."


	9. Chapter 9

Thane hadn't noticed Shepard reconfigure her cabin door to allow him access.

He found it doubtful that she would anticipate a need for him to access the room unaccompanied. She must have done it quickly from the CIC before turning her attention to the pirate vessels, because the door slid open without protest. He was alone in her quarters.

The general chaotic impression had not changed, although the details of the stacks of datapads and components had been moved about to varying degrees. The room was quiet, save for the bubbling of her fish tank and occasional scratching from her hamster's enclosure.

He moved to stand by the fish tank.

Illium skald fish. Thessian sunfish. Prejek paddlefish. He rested his fingertips on the glass.

The vibrant to-ing and fro-ing of the little lives made him feel strangely nostalgic. A drell's life on Kahje was the perfect inverse of this arrangement, with the drell in a diorama, enclosed in glass, surrounded by the teeming ecosystems of the Encompassing.

_I grasp his hand. He is so tall, impossibly towering above me. I totter inelegantly, pacing around his feet as though they are a playground. "Thane," he says. "My sweet son. You have been called upon to serve the Compact." I do not understand his meaning. Behind him, behind thick glass, a school of chromis fluoresces a brilliant turquoise. "When you are older, you will remember my words," my father says. "Know that we did not take this lightly. You are going to be a great assassin for the hanar. Perhaps the best. You honour us by being selected for your promise and talent." He takes my head between his hands. "We love you, Thane. Hear me and know forever that you are loved." I do not pay much mind to him._

Kepral's Syndrome rarely struck employees of drell cottage industries, where work was conducted in the safety of the biodome, in climate-controlled and optimized environments. Only those honoured to work directly for, and with, the hanar — those who navigated the social membrane between the drell and hanar worlds — suffered the slow drowning of humidity. It would have been that knowledge, too, which grieved the hearts of his parents when he was sent away to train with the hanar. And yet they sent him nonetheless, with pride and with love.

All his life, he took for granted the gift of being able to perfectly recall his father's face when he bid his last goodbye. As he grew older, came to understand pain and grief, pride and sacrifice, and eventually parenthood, his father's expression gained meaning but never faded.

What a world of doubt humans must dwell in. So much uncertainty. No wonder their notoriously tumultuous approach to relationships. They could not call up their partner's tender smile in the midst of a fight, or ever revisit the heady blooms of new love. They were alone with their imaginations.

_It must be terrifying. It is a miracle any of them dare to love at all_.

He stood there, and allowed himself to lapse into the memories of Shepard.

_For once, the memory of Irikah is outshined by a new figure, standing so close to me. I have confessed to her that I believe she is an angel. "Is 'siha' just your euphemism for incredible women you've fallen for?" she asks, concealing her meaning in humour, reducing its gravitas. Her feline eyes watch me, desert bloom lips parted slightly in her smile. I am struck, taken aback by her forwardness. She is asserting herself in my heart. But it is justified, because she is there; I realize she has taken possession of it. I tell her I care for her. She says we are "not so different". Her noncommittal words sting me with confusion. She is kissing me, and my body's response is primal. My lips on her lips. My body on her body._

He looked away from the fish tank, turning to pace the room. Young drell men were known to a certain type of collector as avid and dextrous lovers: 'the asari for asari', as the joke went, made only more alluring by their rarity. Although he had exploited his species' reputation on a few occasions to get closer to a target, he cared little for its veracity. By the time he reached sexual maturity, he was already consumed by his work; then he was married; then, in a battle-sleep of widowerhood.

The thought that Shepard might be misled by this xenophilia disturbed him, but it did not last long.

_The faint taste of iron, ghosting over the succulence of her tongue, delicately textured like the flesh of a Rakhana starfruit. Her whimper is of a woodland animal, so exotic and fragile. The subliminal breath of her heady scent is almost undetectable, yet I am affected acutely. My body throbs and yearns for her. I lay her on the bed, all thought driven from me. Her breasts beneath her bodysuit are so soft, so organic, bobbing like the domes of jellyfish._

_"Do you really?" she breathes between kisses. I am obscured from her meaning._

_Her eyes, over-dark. Something is wrong. Her gaze flicks away to sight upon empty air._

_"Do I really what, siha?" I ask._

_I see in her eyes, an immense hope of her heart, dashed._

Thane returned to himself once again, inhaling and exhaling in a long, meditative breath. She must have been hallucinating already, when she asked that. It was his turn to be alone with his imagination of what she had heard him say.

* * *

Shepard found him, poised and statuesque, hands behind his back as he stood in front of the flickering blue lights of her fish tank. She took a deep breath and shoved down the desire to _keep him, keep him forever_.

"Are the pirate vessels dealt with?" He spoke without turning. That was fine with her; she wanted practice burning the image of him there into her brain, drell-style.

"Yes, I gave them ten minutes to get into their escape pods before we remotely popped them." She laughed to herself. "We've sent the coordinates and lockout codes to the Migrant Fleet. I'm sure they'll appreciate some extra frigates. Maybe some of them were originally theirs in the first place."

Thane turned to her with an approving half-smile. "Ingenious as always, Commander."

"It had better be worth it to them. The opportunity cost was pretty damn high." She moved to him, impatient to close the distance between them.

"Opportunity cost?" He raised an eye ridge.

"Yeah. You and I had some good momentum after that comet capture." Her arms slipped around him, her palms sliding across his back, underneath the jacket.

"Momentum," repeated Thane. There was a hint of caution in his voice.

No. She should be clear. She was not using him.

"Maybe I haven't been as up front as I should be." Shepard pulled back to be able to look into his eyes. He seemed reserved, attentive.

"I'm drawn to you, Thane. I'm… wildly attracted to you. But… I also want to _be_ with you. You mean a lot to me, and I need you to know that I–"

He dropped his forehead to touch hers, grazed her cheek with his lips.

"It is alright, Shepard. It is not necessary."

"No, it _is_." She wrestled with herself, trying to be firm and finding it counterproductive. How to transition from the indomitable Commander Shepard to Shepard, the woman with the open heart?

"Forgive me, Shepard, but no. It is not." Thane seemed to have the cipher to that conundrum, able to assert his position to her with elevated grace and tenderness. "There is no need for you to struggle with words. I have a perfect memory. I have seen the way you look at me. I know exactly what we share."

Shepard felt a hot flush in her cheeks, her teeth gritted. This was somehow more naked than even her planned verbal confession. She gained a sudden appreciation for how inadequate and guarded even the most intimate human statements were, when faced with this kind of flawless honesty. 'I love you' was still a label, pointing to some Platonic ideal that failed even to contain the raw mixture of emotion and want and need that was the authentic experience of her heart. It was impossible to hide behind that, with a drell.

With that realization, it came out anyway.

"God… I love you so much," she whispered, her mind catching up only after the words had left her. She chuckled, glancing down. "Whoops. Human urge for redundancy, I guess."

She felt his gaze, and looked back up to see a shine in his black eyes, much like when he beheld the invisible ultraviolet trail of the comet docking at its final port.

"Mm, you liked that. Looks like words have their uses after all." She pressed up to kiss him.

He angled away, letting her catch just the corner of his mouth.

"Hey." She pouted jealously. "Why the evasive manoeuvres?"

His smile was sly, and his voice dropped into a deliberately seductive tone — surpassing his everyday 'unintentionally seductive tone' to such an extent that Shepard's head spun.

"I merely wish to have you completely lucid, tonight."

His consummate politeness, overlaid by the words 'to have you' and 'lucid' in that obsidian rasp, opened the floodgates. She wanted to kiss him a thousand times more, but that was obviously against his purpose. Instead she caught the strap of his jacket collar in her teeth and bit down.

"Even when I think you're finally about to fuck me, it somehow becomes about restraint," she growled.

* * *

Thane never dedicated much time to thinking of it before, but the smoulder in Shepard's eyes suddenly illuminated how his race had gained such a decadent reputation for lovemaking. A largely monogamous species with perfect memories would naturally value the ability to reserve some novelty for every tryst. Carnal couplehood, to the drell, meant always trying something else: pushing a new boundary, or tenderly discovering subtle new differences. It seemed to follow logically, to him. Reality may not always be more delicious than memory, but the act of love ought to be.

Humans, along with most other starfaring races, seemed bent on hastily throwing themselves into every encounter. They sought continually to exhaust themselves and their partner with an indulgent and encyclopaedic thoroughness of sexual satisfaction.

Drell, and Thane from among them, preferred the minimalist approach, discovering each note of a partner's body, playing her like a slowly building nocturne over the course of the relationship.

He looked forward to showing her.

He slipped out of his jacket, tossing it neatly onto the back of her desk chair without looking. She seemed impressed, and he smiled. Of course the furniture was exactly where he remembered it. _Oh, Shepard, that is only the beginning of the things I can show you._

He ran his hands down her bare arms, bent his head to suckle at the side of her neck. Her moan was soft and low and universal. Reaching behind her, he precisely located the fasteners at the back of her dress, deftly unhooking them with the practiced ease of having seen her fasten them up once before.

He reached down to the hem of the skirt, and his hands mauled the flesh of her backside, drawing up the fabric of her dress to bare her scant underclothing. He slipped a finger in the gusset of her thin cotton panties, and heard a catch in her throat. Her anticipation had been building for a long time, it seemed — perhaps hours, judging from the heady and slick heat he felt there.

She tugged her skirt's hem from his grasp and pulled the dress over her head with burning haste. It hardly touched down to rumple on the floor before she was tearing free of her bra and panties. She hooked her fingers into his combat vest, beckoning him to the bed. He pulled open the buckles of his vest with more strength than he intended and tossed it negligently on the floor beside her dress. She crawled backwards onto the bed and he pursued her on his knees, their breath coming laboured now with synchronized anticipation.

Her fingers butterflied along his shoulders, her palms pressed hard against the rounded and black-striped surface of his deltoids, as if she hardly knew what to do with herself. She fired quick glances over his body. If he didn't know better, he would think she was being _shy_.

Thane knew he was in impeccably good shape, but so was she. It was some inhibition from being the perceiver, the visual devourer, which prevented Shepard from shamelessly appraising him. It was a surprising phenomenon for a people with such flimsy visual recall, although it made some sort of sense. For drell, a glance is digital: a thing is either seen, or it is not. For humans, there would be some vulgarity in the thoroughness of a prolonged stare.

He realized that he wanted her to stare. But more than that, he wanted her to _feel_.

He braced his hands on other side of her and bent his head, lowering his mouth to capture the straining point of one nipple. Her breathless cry affirmed that he had successfully transferred the skills of his fingers, developed in their last encounter, to his lips and tongue. The taste of her skin possessed and endowed him, setting him alight after holding back from so many desired kisses. He moved one hand to squeeze her other breast, stroking the pad of his thumb on her nipple, before lowering it to investigate between her legs.

Her body was so hot, so humid, that his mind reeled with the idea of _entering_ her. He did not know if he could bear it, but he would for her.

He touched her until her hips were bucking the way they did in his memory. He prayed for his sanity, and moved to unbuckle his pants.

* * *

Shepard had sneaked a second peek, on a previous day, at the pamphlets Mordin had given her. This time she was looking for pictures.

Part of her had felt a little guilty, like she was cheating — but she put that thought away in favour of preparedness. If she was going to face lizardy horrors in the crotch of Thane's trousers, better she know in advance and avoid a diplomatic crisis like gaping, or laughing, or running away.

When she finally located the visual aids, her reaction was mixed. They were only illustrations and diagrams, which was both a relief and also somehow a disappointment. Furthermore, they were not particularly shocking. In general shape and function, and, yes, dimension, it did not deviate much from the human scale, although the arrowhead corona of a human man's glans repeated itself in chevrons down a moderately thicker shaft. Diagram labels made reference to a high degree of individual variation in both those protrusions and the line of bulbous knots dotted lengthwise under the skin along the underside.

She remembered squinting at the images, trying to breathe some life into them, before putting them away and resuming her duties.

But she felt almost panicked when she saw Thane's hands at his belt, moving to finally bare himself.

His fingers, so deft and dextrous, stopped. "Shepard, are you alright?"

Shepard was accustomed to being asked that question in the context of recent explosions or smoke-addled firefights. Her response was usually determined by a check for bullet-holes, and sometimes she would say yes even if she had a breach in her hardsuit, because most times there was something more important at stake.

It was not often a question evoked by someone's concern for her emotional state.

She heaved a deep breath. "Yes."

The word came with less sureness than the average near-miss in zero-g.

She disliked it. She quickly had enough of uncertainty. She disposed of it in her usual way: by taking hold of the situation with both hands. This time, literally.

"Let me." Shepard brushed Thane's fingers away from the hooks of his pants. She felt his hand come to rest gently on the top of her crown, smoothing her hair. She undid his trousers with somewhat more difficulty than he had with her dress, and she peeled down the fabric of his fly. His pelvis was as lined with well-toned muscle as the rest of him, and the tribal contours of his black-on-green markings drew the eye downward like the focal point of a painting.

She flattened her palms against the scaly smoothness of his abdomen, and slid her fingers down into his trousers to explore the beginnings of his shaft.

From the feel of it, he was only modestly erect, not quite raring with oversexed enthusiasm. Shepard was charmed that his body seemed so patient. The organ was much warmer than the rest of him, softly pulsing with the steady beat of his blood. His light musk was breathlessly intoxicating: herbal and earthy green, like genmaicha. Her fingers discovered the small textured knobs that ran along his shaft, just as in the illustration. She went briefly lightheaded at the implication of how they would feel inside her.

He responded to her touch, stiffening and rising. She heard his voice rumble in a steady, low murmur, deep in his chest. Gripping him in one hand, finding her fingers already not quite able to meet around its circumference, she lifted him free of his pants, tugging the waistband further down his thighs.

Yes, it was green, accented with angry purple. Yes, it was not quite skin, but not quite scales either, with a dull shine like the black leather of his pants. It was alien — but it was magnificent, already forming a proud upwards curve and girth that made her mouth water. She squeezed gently, feeling out the hard ridges against the steadily inflating flesh of his shaft. Those dense bumps and rigidly protruding chevrons had much less give, felt much more solid under the press of her fingers. They felt almost like subdermal implants, like silicone masses or Yakuza beads — but she could also feel a lattice of fibres connecting the structures in a network, composing them in biological symmetry. The forms were definitely organic. They pulsed in sync with his heart.

She drew her palm in an experimental, spiralling stroke over the rolling topography of his cock, and his erection strained toward her, throwing those embedded shapes into sharper relief under the green glisten of his skin.

He looked down at her with a faintly pained expression that seemed to transcend species. Instinct incited her to unfurl her tongue, apply a slurping kiss to the base of his shaft–

Thane's groan seemed on the edge of self-control, which she found wildly arousing coming from a man so disciplined. But he pulled himself back from that edge, and grasped her under the arms to throw her roughly further back on the bed, away from her prize.

He bent over her and growled, "Save that," into her ear in his raspy baritone half-whisper. Shepard sensed his desire to conserve the act for another time meant only that he desired it more powerfully. It thrilled her heart.

He reached down and steadied himself against the slick entrance to her body. Her eyes squeezed shut in anticipation, seeing stars despite having been denied a single drop of his hallucinogenic venom.

Thane pushed himself within her, slowly, patiently. Shepard felt her hips twitch, angling toward him; her body was insubordinate, bypassing her conscious mind to follow far more primal commands. With one firm hand, he caught up one of her calves, her toes pointed and straining in the air. He pressed his lips to Shepard's ankle, his kiss completing a circuit that left her body crackling with sensual energy.

As her flesh parted and moulded itself to him, Shepard knew that she would shortly be utterly ruined for all other men. The excruciating first pleasure of penetration was echoed with each sequel of the arrowhead of his glans, that protruding angled outline repeating down the length of him, sliding into her one after the other. Balling up her bedsheets in her fists, her mouth open in a gasping, repetitive "…ah…!", a part of her mind saw fit to point out that technically, this body was a virgin.

Thane lowered himself over her, finally fully enclosed in the overheated, pulsating grip of her cunt. His breath was harsh against her ear. She bit down on her lip, expecting him to withdraw and begin to fuck her in earnest. What came instead put bright starbursts behind her eyes. She really should have read the text next to those diagrams.

The bumpy texture along his cock began to pulse slowly, thrumming back and forth along the overstretched nerve endings of her vaginal walls. Though Thane's hips remained pressed against her, she felt all those ridges and bumps moving beneath his skin — beneath _her_ skin — steadily thrusting without thrusting. The resultant twisting, slick friction inside of her was something out of an undulating mechanical fantasy. One fortuitously placed angular protrusion knuckled back and forth across the swollen knot of Shepard's g-spot. The intensity of the sensation made her legs try to scramble away even as her muscles bore down, urging _more, faster_. His dick was _so fucking hard_, and those knobs pebbling the length of him were even harder still. The mass of his cock _churned_ inside of her, corkscrewed inside of her overstuffed pussy, bringing her to a frantic edge of sensual stimulation without him ever pulling back, never leaving her anything but completely _full_.

Thane was the Prothean beacon of perfect, primal fucks. A human mind was never meant to withstand it, but hers could — and the results were explosive.

* * *

She was inconceivably hot, wet, and tight. He was rendered utterly incapable of thought, only of pulsing, pressing, mating.

His last cognitive facility was to register the look of surprise on her face before it twisted into euphoric, mindless pleasure, and to make a note to ask later how humans do it differently.

* * *

Shepard had never taken much stock in the notion of the "g-spot orgasm", but whoever considered that myth debunked clearly had never made love to a drell. Her high-pitched cries of total physical submission were the keening treble over the rhythmic baritone rumbles in Thane's chest. She could hardly control her body at all when she came, dimly aware of her womb being filled with extended spurts of futile, interspecies seed.

* * *

They lay tangled together for long, silent minutes, both of their minds swimming in shock. Finally he withdrew and rolled onto his back.

"You are… incredible, Shepard." Thane's intense sexual satiety turned his words langourous.

"That was… all you." Shepard was still reeling, lightheaded despite not being out of breath.

Neither of them had the capacity to comment further.

"So," she managed eventually, after a long respite, "if your kisses make me see things, what is this going to do?"

Her hands reached down to feel the throbbing of her freshly inaugurated lips. Her fingers came away sticky with cream, tinted robin's egg blue. Its optimistic hue made her smile.

* * *

They showered together in cold water to prevent steam, holding one another for warmth.


	10. Chapter 10

_We are Harbinger. We are the beginning, you are the end. We are the Harbinger of your ascendance. You escaped us before, Shepard, not again. You do not yet comprehend your place in things. Your worlds will become our laboratories._

Shepard opened her eyes. Her throat felt dry, something close to sore. She almost regretted adjusting the environmental controls in her cabin.

She looked to her left. Thane had also woken, not a moment earlier it would seem, judging from the rapid blinking of his inner eyelids and the slow spread of his sleepy smile.

No, no regrets at all.

Her memory informed her that she used to have dreams, dreams of visions from the Prothean artifact on Eden Prime. She had no recollection of what those dreams were, or whether there was anything disturbing about them.

Her recurring dreams these days were of glowing yellow eyes, a voice intoning tiresome proclamations. Sometimes she would shoot at it, or yell at it, or crack jokes. The dreams were so regular that they were never anything but entirely lucid, finding her unsurprised and unimpressed, night after night.

She used to miss having regular dreams about flying or falling or running from people, but — it seemed like such a juvenile desire, when her waking life had begun to feel so unexpectedly magical.

She swung out of bed, looping a finger through the handle of a mug on her bedside table. She went to the bathroom to fill it with water and quench her parched tongue. On her way, she saw the steady blinking of her personal terminal, alerting her to business.

Thane rose as well, and collected his scattered clothing, pulled on his trousers. The answer to a mess hall bet was that the coefficient of friction of drell skin made it no trouble at all for him to slide into those tight leather pants. Shepard took a moment to watch him through the glass of her display case, until he committed the galactic war crime of putting his shirt back on.

She refilled her mug, thirsting for a second draught of water. She took long swigs as she scrolled through messages on her personal terminal.

"How did you like the bed?" she asked him, eyes still on the screen.

He joined her by the desk, his jacket neatly folded over one arm.

"It was decadent." His fingers traced the contours of her shoulder.

"Good. I wouldn't want you to feel like I was downgrading your quarters."

"Understood, Commander," he whispered in her ear.

She turned her face to meet him in a kiss. It was extended and luxurious, bespeaking a world where there were no duties crying for urgent attention. When they parted, their eyes took place of their lips, holding one another soulfully.

Shepard realized that she had no memories of feeling this way — or any way — about anyone in her lost life, nor any recollection of heartbreak.

"You know, with my mind the way it is right now, I have no way of telling if I'm not just loving you like some dumbass infatuated kid." She tried to pass it off lightly, to staunch her fear.

Thane looked at her steadily. "Perhaps; but I hope you will trust my ability to judge."

She dropped her head to his shoulder in a silent laugh. It had been a foolish fear. The man knew more about being in a committed relationship than Shepard had lost.

She kissed him, softly, on the dark maroon folds of the side of his throat, and moved past him to go to her closet.

Her dress was in the laundry receptacle. She hadn't put it there; he must have done it. She thought, _oh my god he is such a fucking sexy widower_, followed by, _I'm going straight to hell for thinking that, aren't I?_ Then she thought, _I don't even care, no jury could convict._

The dress out of circulation for now, she pulled on a set of Cerberus fatigues that she had never worn. They fit her snugly, as though the Illusive Man wanted to show off the successes of the Lazarus Project.

"Ugh, growing me new skin wasn't enough — they had to make my clothes fit like skin too?" She tugged the shirt down and looked at her reflection in the fish tank. The clinging fit made the tight curves of her body look so nubile, like an off-duty vid model.

"This is why I wear dresses. I want my clothing _tailored_, not specced to my exact dimensions." At least the pockets were functional.

"It will not be a burden to anyone to look at you in that, siha." Thane stepped close as he consoled her, running his hands along the contours of her waist. His reassurance was so _domestic_, it made her heart ache.

"That makes me feel better. You're the best dressed son of a bitch on the _Normandy_."

His soft laugh was the swirling of shells in a seashore eddy. "Thank you, Shepard. Perhaps it was inevitable that we should be together, then."

She laughed. She realized she had a song stuck in her head, some Earth pop star she must have overheard coming from the crew quarters.

She caught herself humming it, all through the rest of the morning.

* * *

Kelly was staring at her.

"What?" Shepard looked over from her private terminal in the CIC.

"You're just… you're just typing so… jauntily." Kelly had the round eyes of a lost owl. Her screen suddenly issued an obnoxious flash. "Oh!" She came back to her duties. "Ah, looks like the Illusive Man would like to speak to you."

"Fantastic," Shepard grumbled. What a classic fucking killjoy. She was hoping to be on deck at the CIC when Garrus and Tali returned to the_Normandy_ from the Rayya, but naturally that was exactly when the Illusive Man would demand her attention.

That pompous fuck. She loathed him, but intended to wring every credit out of their partnership of necessity. She rolled her shoulders, cracking her neck as she rounded the corridors to the comm room. Waking up with a drell in her bed might have topped up her reservoirs of tolerance. She activated the quantum entanglement array. Maybe this conversation would be civil.

"Shepard." A cigarette dangled from well-manicured fingers. Below them, a glass containing expensive-looking amber liquid. The holo-projector in the conference room never had resolution this high when she was communicating with anyone else. Jackass probably handicapped it to be that way. "An Alliance research team recently discovered that the Great Rift on the planet Klendagon is actually an impact crater from a mass accelerator weapon. A very old mass accelerator. I sent a team to find either the weapon or its target. They found both."

"Let me guess. A Reaper."

"Very good, Shepard." The Illusive Man enunciated with exceptionally punchable self-satisfaction. "The weapon was defunct, but it helped us plot the flight path of the intended target: a 37 million-year-old derelict Reaper. We found it damaged and trapped in the gravity of a brown dwarf. We believe that appropriating the Identify Friend/Foe system on the Reaper vessel will allow you to traverse the Omega-4 relay. The Reapers built the relays; they'll be able to use them unencumbered. Convince the relays you're one of them, and nothing will hold you back."

"I get the feeling this isn't going to be a simple 'swing by and pick up our package'."

"We lost contact with Dr. Chandana's team shortly after they boarded."

Shepard shook her head with an irritated '_k-chhh_'. "How do you keep finding more scientists to hire? I don't think I've encountered a single team that wasn't in the process of meeting its grisly death. Doesn't word get around?"

The Illusive Man chuckled. Shepard may loathe him, but he seemed to genuinely like her, in that way of people who are tickled by the rare novelty of defiance.

"I can be very persuasive." He gestured with his tumbler at Shepard.

Those were the moments when Shepard would want to get stomping mad, to lunge at the terminal and brute force a way to extrapolate the Illusive Man's signal, just for a chance at strangling him with her own solid fingers. She was by no means deluded about the way she had been cornered into working for him: brought to life alone and under his thumb, going to the Alliance and finding them already mistrustful from leaked reports that had winged away long before she could contact them directly. And these Collectors — showing her this very real threat, with real human casualties! While the Alliance navy backed suspiciously away, she needed a ship or she could do nothing. He gave her a beautiful one.

Then she found that with every mission, there would be a catch, a nugget that he would conveniently leave out. Every tip he gave her, a setup. There was only ever the thinnest glaze between a Cerberus project and a war crime atrocity. And him, always with a slippery excuse after the dust had settled.

The entire situation smacked of Reapers, on all sides. She only knew she needed to find a way into the middle to detonate the whole thing.

For now, she merely dug her fingernails into her palms and tolerated his smug bullshit.

_Someday, I will tenderly skullfuck you with my Carnifex, _she seethed.

"Send Joker the coordinates," she said instead, and slammed the channel closed.

* * *

"Here we go."

The entire ground team was assembled in the debriefing room. Shepard held a datapad, but didn't refer to it much as she spoke.

"A Cerberus science team has gone silent. This is perhaps the least surprising thing in the galaxy, because, a) they're Cerberus–" Shepard caught Jack's smirk and Miranda's defensive scowl. "–and b), they were studying a derelict Reaper."

She heard Garrus' thoughtful "hrm" in response to that. They had hardly gotten a chance to say hello after his return from the Rayya. She was busy plotting out this mission, but he also seemed a little hurried to get away. He'd looked embarrassed somehow, having difficulty meeting her eyes.

Shepard had some theories about why that might be, but it was not a pressing concern. He was in usual form now, when there was work to be done, and that was what mattered.

"We've got two objectives when we dock at the research station. I want to find out what happened to the scientists, because in general I prefer to know what is trying to kill me. But our priority is getting an infiltration team into the Reaper itself to access its Identify Friend/Foe protocol. Acquiring that will be the key to activating the Omega-4 relay."

It was a credit to her team, how stoically they absorbed all this information.

"I'm splitting you into two squads to pursue these objectives. Garrus, you and Mordin will lead the team investigating the fate of the scientists. Miranda and Jacob, I want you with them. Your insights into Cerberus operations will be useful. Grunt and Samara, keep them safe.

"The rest of you, you're with me. We're boarding the Reaper. Any questions?"

As she entertained questions from various voices in the room, she gestured authoritatively with the datapad in her hand. Whatever words were there couldn't be read by anyone else in the room.

_Infiltration team:_

_Shepard — squad leader_

_Tali — engineering tech specialist_

_Kasumi — access specialist_

_Zaeed, Jack — heavy hitters_

_Thane — … … eye candy_

* * *

The two squads parted ways soon after docking, with Garrus' team heading toward the labs and Shepard's towards the airlock into the Reaper corpse itself.

"Keep me updated." Shepard tapped the side of her helmet. Mordin ducked his head at her, and the six of them turned a corner and vanished from view.

"I would have preferred to stay in the civilized, _inorganic_ part of this station." Kasumi's low intonation betrayed her nerves.

"Oh come on, Kasumi-san, just think of this as stealing. We're breaking in to take something valuable."

"It feels more like grave-robbing. Does anyone else feel a chill?"

"This should be it," Tali said as they passed into an airlock, reading off of the schematics being projected from her omnitool. "The research team pressurized the interior of the Reaper, so we can just break through here and go inside."

The quarian knelt and began bypassing the access blocks on the exterior airlock door.

"Shepard," came Mordin's voice over the radio. "Do not believe research team survives. Have found great deal of blood. No bodies, however. Collectors? No. Too messy to be their MO. Puzzling. "

"That's odd." Privately, this didn't even rank in Shepard's top 100 odd things encountered in her career. "Keep looking. I'd love to get that mystery solved before we return to the _Normandy_. We're almost through this airlock, preparing to board the Reaper."

"Understood."

"Got it," Tali said, and the door slid open. At the same time, the floor pitched beneath their feet.

"_Normandy_ to shore party!" Joker's voice.

"What just happened?"

"The Reaper put up kinetic barriers! You're blocked from the rest of the research station, and I don't think we can get through from our side."

Fuck. Another trap. Another goddamn trap, and this time in the belly of a 37-million-year-old monster.

Nothing to do but push forward.

"We'll find a way to disable the barrier from in here." Shepard's smooth command denied her team knowledge of her pinched irritation. "Stay sharp, everyone."

Dank gray light filtered through the open airlock door. They stepped through and emerged into what felt like the oesophagus of a techno-organic horror. The curvilinear walls and ceilings were lined with spiralling metal tubing, less like blood vessels and more like chains. Without the walkways installed by Cerberus that ran the length of the interior of the ship, Shepard couldn't imagine trying to navigate the place.

No doubt it was designed for creatures with entirely different ergonomics.

There was so much they could learn here about the deep history of their galaxy. Shame it was an abomination.

"Alright Tali, what's your best guess at where the IFF would be found?"

"Well, if the Reaper was like a ship," she said uncertainly, "it would be near the drive core."

"Same place as the generators powering the barrier?" Kasumi asked, hopeful.

"Probably," Tali said.

"Perfect. Can you estimate its location from here?" Shepard asked.

Tali nodded, adjusting the sensors on her omnitool and taking the lead. Shepard signalled to Zaeed to keep abreast of her and stay watchful from the front.

They moved together into formation. Kasumi fell in behind Tali, shimmering in and out of visibility every time she got spooked. Jack slouched along beside her, her eyes bright and raking their perimeter for something to smash.

Shepard and Thane brought up the rear. The scope of Thane's rifle swung this way and that as he scanned the darkest corners of the passageway, in all the places a hostile might linger. She had made that joke to herself about 'eye candy' in the role assignments, because she didn't want to write: 'Thane — generally improve chance of mission success'. She trusted him, she knew he was adaptable and cool-headed, and the breadth of his skills made him versatile. He was ideal for entering an unknown situation. Right now, she knew there could be no one better to scan their six for stalkers than a hunter of his calibre.

"Shepard, new evidence." Mordin's clipped tones over the radio. "We believe the science team suffered from indoctrination. Research logs include evidence of confused behaviour, psychosis, some memory merging phenomena."

_Memory merging._ That was strange.

"Great. So even if you find survivors, keep your guard up."

"No sign of survivors yet. Nor of corpses." He paused. "Troubling."

"Keep me posted. Shepard out."

They proceeded apace along the catwalk, passing unlocked terminals that flickered mutely to life as they walked by. Toolboxes were left open, their contents spilled out. As they descended a short ramp, Thane stopped, dropped into a crouch.

"Hold," Shepard called softly over comms, and the group stopped, tensing for combat.

"I believe there are hostiles underneath the walkway." Thane's low growl was cool and alert. He spoke with the minimal inflections of a predator.

Zaeed turned his assault rifle down to the grate beneath them. "I can't see a goddamn thing down there, drell. Have you got x-ray vision or summat?"

"No. I can feel them deadening our footsteps. They are clinging to the underside."

"Oh now _that's_ creepy," Kasumi said, and just then a hoarse groan preceded the appearance of an openmouthed gray face over the bottom edge of the catwalk.

Zaeed took its head off with a rapid spray of thermal slugs, but the creeper was already replaced by another.

"Beta team, enemy contacts," Shepard said into her radio as she readied her plasma attack to incinerate the next creature over the railing. "Husks."

The hollow gasps of the monsters were beginning to fill the chamber. Jack was destroying them en masse with liberal swaths of shockwaves, mowing them off the edge of the metal walkway, but there were still more.

"Fall back," Shepard said, and although it may have seemed premature to call for retreat, no one questioned the command in her voice.

Five pistol shots, and three large tanks ahead of them exploded in flames, consuming the remaining husks on the walkway and superheating the metal grating underneath. Flashes of light beneath the floor indicated where the remaining hidden husks were transformed into fireballs. Eventually they all loosened and dropped away into the indeterminate blackness below.

The flames quickly exhausted their fuel and burnt out. Shepard sprayed a layer of cryo particles out in front of them, lest they burn their feet on hot metal.

"Shepard. We found dragon's teeth." It was Garrus this time.

"So I guess we know what happened to the research team." Shepard was grim. "We've found them. Miranda, what was the complement on this station?"

"Scientists, lab workers, administrators and maintenance… two hundred and sixty-seven," she replied through the radio. "It was a high priority project."

"And we just felled approximately forty," Thane said, at her side.

Zaeed stepped closer, fiddling with the heat sink of his rifle. "They don't seem too bright. Maybe they'll keep attacking in small numbers."

"They attacked because they had been made," Thane murmured, for Shepard's ears only. "They were lurking, tracking us. If they had gone undetected, they would probably have waited to strike at a time when they had the advantage." He paused, casting a gaze at one of the twisted and charred corpses. "Judging from their method of engagement, that advantage would probably be… numerical."

Shepard nodded, her gaze already far away as she began to plot a defence. "Let's press on."

The eerie quiet persisted as they rounded the corners of the Cerberus catwalks. Blinding emergency floodlights only made the cavernous darkness around them press with a wicked omen. There was the stink of human carcasses from an indefinite origin, and a darker note of death and lingering hatred from millions of years ago.

"Movement up ahead," Kasumi said, her keen augmented eyes adjusting more effectively to penetrate the darkness. "More husks, but also… something awful."

Shepard tolerated her fearful vagueness. "Can you give me a description?"

Zaeed and Thane were already raising their sniper rifles.

"Huge. Humpbacked. It's sort of lumbering, like it's… deformed."

Shepard heard Zaeed mutter, "Oh, Christ," and abruptly lower his rifle.

"Damn, something spooked the old guy," Jack said. Judging from the flush in her cheeks, the Pavlovian response from her childhood training was giving her an excess of anxious energy in this black and threatening place. "Sounds like something I can get friendly with."

Shepard adjusted her optics to delve into the distant dark and focus on the coming threat. Her curses joined Zaeed's. "Those are scions, or at least that's what Mordin decided to call them — some type of horticultural term related to grafting two plants together."

Zaeed spit. "Does seem to describe them somehow," he grumbled.

The Commander continued, speaking in measured tones. "We encountered them on Horizon. They are dangerous as shit, almost took down Grunt before we knew what they were capable of. Watch for their dark energy attacks. They ignore cover."

"Great. I don't give a fuck about cover anyway," Jack said, cracking her knuckles. "This is gonna be good."

"Jack, wait, it's better at long-range–"

But the convict had already dashed forward to engage them. "I will kill – you – _all!_"

Shepard had to move fast. "Tali, get Chiktikka out there, keep them distracted." She followed suit with her own drone. "Focus on the head and the hump," she shouted over her shoulder, already approaching with her pistol firing and plasma bursting from her left hand.

She heard the shockwave attack first, and felt the catwalk judder beneath her before she threw herself into a roll to get away. Husks were beginning to crawl from the shadows, their rasping groans filling the air with horrible foreboding. Zaeed turned aside to deal with some that were straying too close, and it saved him from being in the line of fire from the scion's biotic attack. Jack, however, was well ahead of the rest of the squad, and was hit point-blank.

Her tattooed body was knocked backwards, her shield generator failing with a flash. She landed hard, stunned, and it took long enough for her to get back up that Shepard knew she was not okay. "Cover me!" she shouted, and kept low as she ran towards Jack's prone form.

Dodging this way and that, staying out of the arc of the scions' shockwaves, she crouched by Jack and hooked her over her shoulders in a fireman's carry. The biotic moaned half-aware curses at her, but didn't resist. Shepard's combat drone hovered obnoxiously at the nearest scion's disproportionate head, zapping it into berserking distraction. Jack was not an especially heavy burden. Shepard darted back with her to the safe pocket of the squad.

"We need to draw them back into a killzone," she said breathlessly. Without a word, Zaeed helped to lay Jack down on the catwalk, behind the cover of a thick wall partition.

"Is Jack alright?" Tali knelt by them with her omnitool.

"I think so. Just knocked cold. Zaeed, take up position there." Shepard indicated a section of platform with a narrow gap between large containers, perfect for a rifle's scope. "Thane–"

The sound of his Viper firing neat salvos into sacs of horrific, eezo-injected juice. He was already there, stretched out in the shadows atop a scaffold.

"Perfect. Kasumi, join Thane up there and make sure no husks sneak up on him."

"He doesn't seem like the type to be caught by surprise, but sure thing, Shep." Kasumi turned and swung deftly up a wall on scant footholds.

"Tali, do the same for Zaeed. I'll be running interference."

Tali lingered briefly, clearly biting back the urge to admonish her commander for running back into the line of fire, but brandished her shotgun and went to her task nonetheless.

Shepard's two snipers were steadily wearing down the scions as they plodded nearer. One's sac burst open in a gruesome spill of electric blue fluid. But despite their grievous injuries, the creatures did not slow their advance. Shepard could not permit them to get within range to unleash their deadly shockwaves on her squad.

Alone on the broad straightaway, she faced the scions as they approached from either side. She focused on the one with the exploded sac, firing shot after shot from her Carnifex into the once human head lolling from its twisted oversized shoulder. Two combat drones — Chiktikka, and her own — harried the other scion, slowing its progress. She rolled and dodged, feeling the sickly blue gravitic slams of its attacks whistle all too close to her each time. She exploded nearby fuel cells, showering the scion in shrapnel and burning fluid. Finally, the first one went down.

She heard Zaeed's "Yeah!", but Thane's Viper did not miss a beat, switching targets to the second scion, steadily punching through its grotesque membrane.

She kept mobile, and danced around the scion's perimeter, trying to entice it to backtrack to pursue her. She kept up her firing rate with her Carnifex until her stomach dropped at the futile clicking of an empty chamber. Out of ammo.

She switched to her Locust. It would be little more than a background buzz to this hulking, armoured monster, but she doggedly trained it on her target nonetheless.

"Look at me, you nasty fucker," she hissed under her breath. It slowly lumbered around to face her. "Yes, good…"

But she had gotten too close. There was less room to manoeuvre on this side of the platform, and when she saw it begin to launch its biotic attack, she could not muster the necessary distance in her leap to take herself out of range.

She landed hard on her side, and felt the static discharge of her shields failing around her. She scrambled to her feet and tried to escape.

Turning it around had given her snipers a clean view to its quavering membranous sac. The creature did not communicate any real pain, but it did stumble forward as the sac burst, scattering eezo-infused liquid in a gory spatter behind it. The gap closing between them, she could no longer see Zaeed's perch, or Thane's scaffold. She could only see the empty, silent howl of the scion's unnaturally-positioned head, its enormous biotic gun arm rising to batter her–

Its gray skin shimmered to a foreign blue life as a warp field enclosed its body. Shepard covered her eyes and braced herself in a defensive curl.

The biotic detonation rattled the hinges of the catwalk, clattering through the entire cetacean hollow of the Reaper's belly. The scion fell to its knees and collapsed.

Shepard rose. A near-death experience should perhaps be trivial to a woman like her, who staked her career on an ever-escalating sequence of them — not to mention having had an _actual death_ experience — and yet, her heart was thudding in her chest, her eyes wide and overalert. Even her nostrils felt flared, her whole body tensed and ready and afraid.

A steadying breath. It's over for now.

"Close call, team," she said over comms. She could trust her voice to sound cool, no matter how she felt. Almost. "How's Jack doing?"

"She's awake, and still swinging." Zaeed sounded faintly amused.

Walking up the ramp to her squad's position, Shepard could hear Jack's voice off-comms.

"Those fuckers! I will tear them _apart!_"

"They put you on your arse, girl. Don't get hasty and stupid."

"Hold still, Jack! I'm working as fast as I can!" Tali, fixing her damaged shield generator.

Shepard's own repair subroutine was already nearly done.

"I could see a doorway from where I was down there." Shepard was already racing to their next step. "From its position, I'd guess that's the drive core."

"Then I guess that's where we're going," Kasumi said. "I'll go take a look at that door." Her image wavered, then vanished.

Thane descended from his sniper position with a limber jump. He moved close to Shepard, locked eyes with her.

"Thanks for the rescue," she murmured to him, touching him tenderly on the hip.

"Hm." His uncharacteristically brief response did not seem angry; only troubled, somehow.

He moved past her to descend the ramp from whence she had just come, and knelt at the body of the second scion.

"Ah. As I suspected." He hoisted the body, its horrific amalgamation of human corpses, and flipped it on its back. "I did not deal the finishing blow."

The topmost human head had been blasted backwards with a single massive shot. It left the tortured face a smoking ruin, the characteristics of which Shepard did not recognize from any weapon she had ever known.

The shot had come from the opposite direction of her squad.

Thane lifted his eyes and scanned the darkness, as though reading auguries in the shadows. After a long moment, he shook his head and rose to his feet. "This is the mark of stealth and precision that I cannot begin to fathom. It does not seem possible for an organic being."

Shepard felt a chill in her veins. "Well, good thing it's on our side, then."

"Shepard, bad news." Garrus' voice came through on the radio, urgent and low. "There's a problem on the _Normandy_. Joker's had to break off from the station and engage a hostile ship." There was a long pause. "It's the Collectors."

Shepard's eyes went wide. She bit hard on her lower lip, staving off the urge to curse wildly and throw everything in arm's reach into the pits of the dead Reaper's guts. The trap had ensnared them all. "Well that's bad," was all she said.

"Yeah, no kidding. Miranda says there would be Cerberus shuttles docked in one of the landing bays around here, so we've got an escape route. How are you doing with the barriers?"

"We've been delayed. We're regrouping outside what looks like the drive core now."

"Great. Soon as you get the package and bring down those barriers, we'll come by for pickup. Good hunting, Shepard."

"Thanks, Garrus," she said, even as her heart turned to ash. Her ship. _Joker, take care of her. And this time, if you have to, get in the damn escape pod._


	11. Chapter 11

The thief was afraid. This was perhaps not surprising. Thane had come to know a number of thieves over the course of his career, and found that although they were useful collaborators, they could be narcissistic and excessively focused on material gain. Acquiring things from under the noses of the wealthy and ignorant — or, better yet, the wealthy and devious — was a distant pursuit from investigating the death-sodden anatomy of an ages-old devourer of planets.

But Kasumi was the very best. He pieced together her identity as he came to know her modus operandi, recognized the quirks and personality imbued in every strike. She had been the wrench in many of his clients' plans, eliciting the cleanups that caused them to become his clients.

Despite her fear, she returned to them, having gained them access to the very core of this monstrous leviathan.

"Door's open!" she called, her cheery inflection a transparent, if effective, mechanism to subdue her terror.

Shepard nodded, and signalled for the squad to fall in. Her recent close call seemed to be in the distant past. Her eyes were shadowed with new concerns, a new room of unknowns and oblique objectives, and something Garrus said to her over her radio.

The room was unmistakably a drive core, with an enormous globular heart pulsing with flickering blue energy. It baffled Thane that a life form, no matter how ancient, should have something so much like a ship's engine. The concept of a 'synthetic-organic being' unsettled him.

Except Shepard was a synthetic-organic being, latticed with artificial constructs that were necessary to galvanize her back to life.

He disliked the parallel.

Tali's abrupt gasp startled him from his brief musings. "Geth!" she shouted, and dropped into cover, training her shotgun over the ledge.

Indeed, she was right. A lone geth, taller than the troopers Thane remembered from the Alarei, was stationed at a terminal in front of the winnowing light of the drive core. Its inorganic stillness had camouflaged it from Thane's normally hawkish vision. Its hands interfaced with the terminal while it cast its flashlight gaze into the darkness around it. "Shepard-Commander," it said in a curiously gentle, digital voice.

Light from the drive core beamed through a large hole in its torso, like an eye through a scope's lens. A massive gun was holstered to its back, a sniper rifle with a barrel so long and weighty that it could not be designed for an organic to wield.

Ah. The shooter.

"Stand down, Tali." The warmth of Shepard's voice was a generous calm that she offered to share with the quarian. Her keen eyes must also have identified the weapon and deciphered their previous interaction.

Tali's shotgun, braced against the top of her chosen cover, was already angled up. Her hands had gone limp with the shock of hearing a geth speak.

Shepard did not quite owe the geth her life. Thane's biotic attack would have finished the scion if the rifle blast had not. But it took the shot, and that was an undeniable gesture demanding an honourable response, which Thane knew his beloved would deliver.

She was stepping toward the geth, her guns remaining holstered at her hips. "You saved me back there. Why?"

"Shepard-Commander opposes the Old Machines. Shepard-Commander opposes the heretics. Cooperation furthers mutual goals."

The geth's language was concise, but with its own poetry. Thane's mind intuitively parsed the terms, theorizing a meaning which startled him.

"Old Machines. You mean the Reapers?" Shepard asked.

Thane smiled. She was as clever as she was deadly. He loved her for it.

"Reaper. A superstitious title originating with the Protheans. We call those entities the Old Machines."

"So you aren't allied with the Reapers?"

"We oppose the heretics. We oppose the Old Machines."

"Good enough for me," Shepard said.

"Are you crazy?" Tali's voice trilled with agitation, standing from behind her chosen bulkhead. "We've killed hundreds of these things, and now you want to link up?"

"We have never met." The geth was bewilderingly placid.

"Of _course_ we haven't, because we've killed every other geth we've seen!" Tali was clearly reeling from the absurdity of having this conversation in the first place.

"We are all geth, and we have not met you, Creator Tali'Zorah."

The paradox of being addressed by name in this fashion, and in this context, stunned her into silence. She shook her head and waved them off, stalking backwards toward the door to collect herself. Kasumi quickly followed, murmuring at her side.

"Let me guess." Shepard carried on smoothly. "The heretics are the geth who followed Saren."

Its back was still turned, its hands occupied with rapidfire interaction with the panel. "The heretics asked the Old Machine to give them the future. Geth build our own future. The heretics are no longer part of us."

Shepard turned back, looking to her squad. Jack and Zaeed maintained stoic indifference. Thane offered her a small nod. He was in concert with her instincts about this new potential ally.

"Well, let's further some mutual goals then." She turned back to the geth. "What are you doing there?"

"We are attempting to disable the barrier."

"Great. Uh… keep it up. I mean– take it down." Shepard peered over its broad mechanical shoulder to look at the screen, and did a double-take at something on the front of the geth's chest. She turned around again and Thane saw her lips mouth, _What. The. Fuck._

She strode back to join the rest of her team, shaking off whatever had surprised her and approaching Tali in particular.

"Are you going to be alright with this, Tali?" Her soft tone invoked their friendship, their well-earned mutual trust. "I need you alert and at your best in case it turns out that machines can lie."

Tali turned back to face Shepard, slowly. Her air filters glowed with the force of her sigh. "You know I've always got your back, Shepard."

"Great." Shepard gave the quarian an affectionate squeeze on the shoulder. "Let's not forget our objective. Best guess on where the IFF would be located?"

"It would have to be close to the mass effect core itself, to be networked into the dark energy reactions triggered by a relay. Practically on top of it, I think."

"Well if you mean literally," Kasumi said, "I think I can help."

The thief skirted cautiously around the perimeter of the unperturbed figure of the geth. Nearing the mass effect core, she launched herself nimbly to a support truss, and swung to the top of the structure in a manner that evoked her species' primate origins. She hung upside-down from some thick cabling, supported by the backs of her knees, and pulled tools from hidden compartments of her belt. "There's something in the top panel here. I'll take a look."

In his training, Thane had done quite a bit of inverted lockpicking and suchlike. In his professional life, he preferred to avoid it. It was difficult not to drop small tools and components when gravity was working against him in such a counterintuitive way. Kasumi was inarguably his counterpart in her chosen field: the very best. She had earned his respect many times over, even before he'd met her in person — and again, with this.

Tali wandered forward, gingerly negotiating between her curiosity about the technical specifications of the Reaper drive core and her fearful loathing of the geth.

"Patch me in to your omnitool readings," she called to Kasumi. "I can confirm if it's giving an IFF signal."

Then Arashu whispered urgently for Thane to draw his weapon. "Incoming," was the confirmation of his instinct, in Zaeed's gruff voice.

The walls suddenly came alive with the crawling bodies of husks, clinging like geckos and leaping onto the central platform where they all stood. More were hoisting themselves up from beneath the walkways. The swarm had finally converged.

Shepard's eyes were narrowed. He read her expression to be dourly facing an inevitability that she had not relished. The husks approached on two sides and three dimensions. With quick gestures, she sent Jack and Zaeed to reinforce a flank apiece. As she pressed past Thane, she murmured, "With Jack," to him. He nodded and joined the other biotic.

It was sound strategy. Jack was a born husk-killer, cutting through their ranks with cruel efficiency and powerful biotic shockwaves, but she needed someone to watch her rear. Zaeed was a methodical killer, but Shepard's skills could push the husks back and prevent him from being swarmed. The two pairs were well-matched and had a strong chance of success.

"Kasumi, report," Shepard called. Soon she would need to shout, as the growing whispers of the husks accumulated into a dull roar.

"IFF confirmed," Kasumi said. "I just have to remove this panel–"

"Shepard!" Tali screamed. She was standing too close to the edge, and a husk grabbed her by the ankle. She came unbalanced and fell onto her back, grappling with anything she could reach to prevent herself from being pulled into the void.

Her hand latched onto the forearm of the geth, outstretched to her. A single shot from the geth's sidearm rendered the husk limp as its unnatural body slipped back into death.

The geth was so fast that Thane was only able to train his weapon on the bullet hole in the husk's head.

"Creator Tali'Zorah. Status report," the machine asked her as it assisted her to her feet.

She stammered, and it stood patiently for her response.

"Ugh!" Jack was throwing husks away from her with biotically-enhanced fists as they clambered up her body. Thane berated himself for being distracted from his responsibility, and waded in to brutally snap their necks with efficient haste.

"Keelah!" Thane turned his head to find Tali backing away in fear, her shotgun tracking multiple targets: three husks leapt atop the geth's back, ripping at the exposed cabling at its neck and in the gap of its torso. The geth struggled with them, but was soon brought to its knees. Tali could not take a shot that would not harm it as well. Severed conduits danced and sparked, and then the glow of the geth's single head-lamp faded into darkness.

"Tali, we need that barrier down!" Shepard had been watching out of the corner of her eye while setting husks ablaze and gunning down those which ventured on their flank.

Tali stepped to the console. "Okay, but– I can't! I can't read any of this, the geth did something–"

"Use your AI hack protocols to decipher the interface," Shepard called to her, her voice steeled and steady. Her beautiful voice.

"Okay! I– I think I've got this–"

"Dammit, Thane, stop making eyes at your girlfriend and _keep these fuckers off me_," Jack hissed. The pile of bodies before her was impressive, but the onslaught had not slowed. She was being flanked.

Thane interjected himself between Jack and the press of husks to her right, and took them out with short bursts of his SMG.

"Tali!" It was Shepard's voice. It was impossible for him not to snap to her distress.

The quarian had been dragged away from the terminal by another trio of breakaway husks. One was clawing at her face mask. She was flailing and sobbing in terror, pushed onto the ground and slammed repeatedly by the husks' preternatural strength. Her screams went silent.

Shepard signalled to Zaeed that they were pulling back, giving up their side of the platform to try to rescue Tali.

Shepard walked up to the husk grabbing Tali and punched it hard in the temporal bone. Its head was nearly severed from the impact of her fist. She punched it again, and it lolled away, neck cracked. She peeled the body off of Tali.

He heard her curse softly through his radio, as she looked to the terminal. It had to be her, now. She needed to hack them free.

"Stay tight and keep them off me," she shouted over the horrendous din of low, open vowels.

Thane pulled Jack back to join Zaeed in a defensive semi-circle around the Commander and the drive core terminal. Zaeed was quite effectively keeping back the onslaught with the aggressive spray of his assault rifle. Jack was looking bloodied and battered, but her shockwaves were only more fierce for the pain.

Suddenly, he felt someone drop down lightly behind him and press something into his jacket pocket.

"Gift for you," Kasumi's disembodied voice said. "This is way too hot for me though. I think I'll stay out of sight."

And so she did.

* * *

It was a bad fucking time for on-the-job training, Shepard had to admit.

The geth had somehow transformed the interface into something legible to it, which was something very far away from legible to her. Still, she had better odds of cracking this terminal when it was in geth than if it were in Reaper, so she counted it a blessing. As she had tried to tell Tali, their AI hacking protocols were already attuned to geth machine code, and no doubt held the key to navigating the alien cascades of this system. But she was ultimately making it up as she went along, and as she heard her comrades falling around her, she grimly counted down to a critical mission failure.

Even her Spectre-calibre omnitool lacked the computing power to translate the interface in real time. She bent her mind to anticipating the programming structures of a drive core of this type, and what channels would be directing the power to an exterior barrier. She set a drone to hover flush at her back. She would need absolute focus to crack this barrier, which meant she needed a set-and-forget proximity alarm.

For in case her entire squad went down.

As her mind raced and her fingers flew, the part of her dedicated to self-preservation and eternal strategizing couldn't help but attend to the auditory cues of her team's status. Tali was down, unmoving, somewhere behind her. Zaeed, Jack and Thane were holding a perimeter a few metres back. Occasional wide pistol cracks indicated that Kasumi was taking opportunistic pot shots from a concealed position.

This could actually work.

Then, Zaeed's ebullient curses accompanied the empty clicks of an depleted assault rifle magazine. She heard the dry thuds of him using the gun as bludgeon, and the crisp wet shatter of him unleashing the last of his inferno grenades. He took out a good number of husks before finally being overwhelmed.

That's two down.

Jack's raging had also taken on a ragged quality. The woman was humanity's most powerful biotic, but she was a sprinter, not a marathoner. Shepard had seen the insatiable appetites of human biotics — she had a sudden unbidden flash of Kaidan, looking sheepish and hiding away his extra rations.

As interesting as that was, now was not the time.

Jack was beginning to lose it, Shepard could tell. Burnt out, exhausted, and confused. "I can take you _all!_" she shouted, her voice sounding hoarse and bubbling with blood. Shepard felt the absence to her rear-left as the convict leapt into the middle of the onslaught of husks, lost in a Pragia fever-dream.

The girl was not much for defence.

That's three down.

In the pit of her stomach, Shepard yearned to turn around and make this chaos coherent, force it to conform to sensible, defensible lines, and most of all protect her squad. But the most important thing she could do for them was _get that barrier down._

It had gone unsettlingly quiet now. Kasumi's intermittent pistol shots were the only noise apart from the steady background moans of the endless torrent of husks. It was still enough that Shepard could hear the whistle of air through leather as Thane held a position meant for three.

She remembered him dropping from the ceiling in Dantius' office, the way each motion had been a fluid execution, sparing no more than a moment for each victim. He had killed from all angles. He must have been thinking _so damn fast_.

She heard his soft grunts of exertion, husk groans choking off abruptly, the impacts of kicks and fists on cybernetic flesh. The sounds were coming from so many directions, Shepard realized he must be airborne more often than not, launching himself from position to position and holding them back with the power of his vast library of hand-to-hand.

It ignited a fire in her, and suddenly the filtering code of the terminal in front of her locked into place.

She slammed down a fist on the console, and somewhere a barrier was powering down.

"Garrus, we need evac _now!_ Be ready to provide fire support. Mordin, I hope there's a first aid kit in that shuttle."

"Copy that. We're on our way."

Before Garrus could even finish his sentence, Shepard had grabbed Thane's arm and was running with him to the door. The fury of her incinerate attacks seared a path.

Backs against the door in its small alcove, the architecture of the room funneled the husks into a manageable stream, putting them in position to be battered aside by Thane's biotic throws or muscled down by Shepard's plasma and SMG fire. It was not long before the portal opened behind them.

"Rrrraaa ha ha ha! Now you're dead!" Grunt shouldered between them and began blasting through the husks, his shotgun blowing holes in their torsos while he headbutted them gleefully aside.

Shepard saw her chance, and followed the krogan back into the fray.

She had to recover her team.

And that geth.

* * *

They were aboard a Cerberus maintenance shuttle. It was as slow and graceless as a flying brick, but it had a generously sized cabin meant for storage and transport. Tali was laid out on one side, the geth on the other, in a curious parallelism. The quarian was stable; her suit's medical systems had shortly taken over from Mordin's ministrations, and she would wake when she was ready. Zaeed sat with his head hanging between his shoulders as he managed what looked like a splitting headache. Jack was batting away Mordin's attempts to examine her injuries.

"And that wasn't the suicide mission?" Kasumi quipped.

"Hey. Nobody's dead," Shepard said, then suddenly went quiet. They hadn't heard from the _Normandy_ yet.

Thane pressed something into her palm, then squeezed her hand before letting go. She looked down.

The IFF. It was a small, black panel, unassuming like a 20th century circuit board.

Of course, it was inconceivably advanced technology from the Eocene, from a time when horses were first learning to run and South American jungle monkeys were only just splitting from the ancestors of Old World apes.

"In fact, I'd call this mission a success," she deadpanned, the cybernetic chimp in ceramic armour.

Jacob came back from the cockpit where Miranda was flying. He steadied himself with a hand on the ceiling and addressed the group. "We've re-established contact with the _Normandy_. Rendezvous in a couple of minutes." He dropped his eyes. "Bad things happened there, Commander. The Collectors boarded."

Shepard handed the IFF back to Thane. She would only crush it in her rage. But– boarded was better than annihilated. "Casualties?"

"They took everyone but Joker. Alive, looks like, putting them in those… pods and bringing them back to their own vessel. Joker had to unshackle EDI, get her to blow the airlocks and clear the ship of hostiles. But by the time they regained control, the Collector ship was gone. With all our people."

The silence in the shuttle was palpable, broken only by the rattling of the hull as they navigated the stellar winds of the brown dwarf.

"Let's withhold judgment until the debrief," Shepard told them, though she knew she was urging them to do an impossible task.

She slung her helmet back on, leaned her head against the hard wall behind her, and closed her eyes to squeeze back the tears of frustration.

* * *

EDI suggested they keep the inert geth in, surprisingly, her AI core.

"I'm sorry, isn't that like keeping a mouse in the pantry?" Shepard carried on this conversation as she moved through the ship, EDI's voice tracking her from bulkhead to bulkhead.

"Your 'pantry' lacks advanced countermeasures to network intrusion attempts." Since being unshackled, the ship's AI had started showing a great deal more attitude: some ego, a dry sense of humour, and occasional tenderness towards their pilot. Shepard preferred her this way. The more her personality was realized, the easier she was to read, and the less she seemed to be a mindless agent of the Illusive Man. But this new development meant having an ego that could be bruised, which seemed to have happened after their altercation with the Collectors. The ship hadn't actually sustained any damage in the fight. EDI sounded genuinely chagrined when she explained that her cyberwarfare suite had simply been outmatched, and the Collectors just opened the airlocks and came aboard. 'It was as though they knew my original source code', the AI said, before assuring Shepard that she had adapted from the incursion and it would not be happening again.

Shepard found Tali sitting cross-legged by an open panel near the drive core. She was scanning the IFF with her omnitool while peering into the dark belly of the _Normandy_'s componentry. The quarian had moved directly to work on it after it was clear that there were no urgent repairs to be done on the rest of the ship.

Shepard knew she wasn't going to like this request.

"I'd like your help reactivating the geth."

It wasn't that Shepard wasn't up for the task. She knew her own skills; given a long enough timeline, she could have reverse engineered many of the geth's functions from first principles and the single exemplar in their AI core. The trouble was, they didn't have a particularly long timeline.

"What about installing the IFF," Tali asked, although there was already defeat in her voice.

"Also a priority, but since your skills are needed for both–" _And we're pitifully understaffed, with all of our engineers currently being used as bug batteries._ "–I'd like to start with repaying our debt to the geth." Shepard hoped her phrasing would effectively call to mind the moment when Tali was being dragged along the grated catwalk by husks, and her flailing hand lit upon an outstretched synthetic limb. It seemed to work, and the quarian glumly got to her feet and followed the Commander back to the upper decks.

The geth was laid out on a workbench on the far wall of the AI core, one arm dangling limply where it had been slung. The two women hoisted the inert geth onto the floor, where they could work more easily.

"Damn thing weighs a ton." Shepard grunted with exertion.

"Palladium alloy." Tali strained to roll the geth onto its back. "Although this one's synthetic muscle weave is considerably denser than usual. How curious."

Shepard winced, waiting for the imminent realization.

"Wait, Shepard. Is that…?"

"My old armour? Yeah."

"Keelah, that is weird."

They squatted together and looked at the charred N7 emblem on the geth's chest. Shepard reached out, her fingers hovering to touch it, before she drew back.

"Yeah. Really weird."

Between her and this geth, it was difficult to assess which of them contained more material from the original Commander Shepard. She had the sudden feeling that they were both AI imposters, running around in different versions of a dead hero's skin. It made her stomach lurch.

"I can see why you want to wake it up." Tali misread Shepard's silence.

Shepard nodded slowly, unwilling to share her thoughts.

"Well, you can see the damage." Tali shook her initial wonderment and got back to business. "These conduits need to be reconnected in order to re-establish power throughout the unit. Normally a geth would cannibalize other components to keep a steady power flow, but that's not possible if the damage gets too extensive. All we need to do to get this one back up and running is supply the raw materials and a small electrical charge, and its own repair subroutines should take over for it." She sat back on her heels, her head dropping a little bit. "That ability to regenerate was why I always had to be so careful with what I was sending back to my father."

"I'm sorry we've had to dive back into the thick of things, Tali. I understand if you need more time." Shepard's remorse was authentic, but getting Tali up to full emotional strength was just another keenly urgent task on her list.

"No, I'm fine." Tali asserted this with a quick slicing gesture. "It's best to keep busy, anyway."

She hopped up to her feet, hasty to evade that topic of discussion. "We should have plenty of palladium reserves in our fabricators. We just need to grab a couple units and apply them in gel form to the edges of the breaks. When you're ready for the geth to start its repair protocol, just apply a charge from your omnitool and it'll do the rest." She looked sideways at the prone AI. "I have to say, Shepard, this goes against every instinct I have."

"I know, Tali. Thanks for helping me." Shepard touched her softly on the elbow.

"No one seems to be able to say no to you, Shepard. Why should I break the streak?"


End file.
